


they call this progress

by pettiot



Series: progress!verse [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Double Penetration, F/M, Forgiveness, Guns, M/M, Multi, Oral, Period-Typical Racism, Wild West AU, abusive/antagonistic relationship, grudge-based relationships, journal-based storytelling, only mildly subverted, sort of redemption?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-19
Updated: 2008-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:13:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23213071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Ffamran's locked in a cupboard, Vossler's locked into memories of a betrayal he can't forget, everyone's on a train, and somewhere along the way Basch and Fran hooked up and decided to destabilise an Empire.
Relationships: Balthier/Basch, Balthier/Fran, Balthier/Vossler, Basch/Fran, Basch/Vossler, basch/fran/vossler/balthier
Series: progress!verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668958
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

At present I find myself locked in a luggage compartment, which is, on consideration, quite a grand name for what is little larger than a cupboard.

Cupboard or no, this train is the finest of its kind this side of the great ocean, one of only three left in service after the privations of the war. Even my paltry cupboard is fitted with a small window, so I recline as best I can against the vibration of the side panel and watch the clouds pass by. It's quite peaceful in here, and waiting for my head to stop pounding seems a wise decision. Perhaps Vossler will stir himself when I fail to return; regardless, I find myself willing to wait, well away from the explosive threat of his morning hangover.

It amuses me that I have little to no desire to change my current circumstance.

One thing engendering in me a certain regret for this chain of circumstance, however, that began with leaving my father's retainer and ending with this current dubious location is the noted lack of women. On encountering Fate's mortal mistress today, for all the lady in question was Viera, I became unwary enough to fall, figuratively so, into this locked cupboard.

I would write somewhat on the qualities of beautiful women, a reminder of why I let myself slip so far at the sight of one Viera, but the list would be painfully short. That in itself is sufficient justification for my actions.

Not that such feminine deprivation seemed to affect my current companion in the slightest. From what I experience of Vossler's midnight advances, the man is too accustomed to male companionship to feel the lack. I once ventured a question as to whether he had been a part of the General's great military expedition at some point -- his marksmanship and strength, still considerable despite his ceaseless drinking and the spread of his gut, would suggest so, not to failing to mention, yes, his expectation that I would bend to not only servicing him in the middle of the night but also to buffing his boots, doing his laundry and tending his cursed horse. Decidedly military, there; officer material, in fact. My attempt to broach such a topic may have been better considered without his fingers broaching me, for all that I earned for my innocent concern was a limp that persisted well into the next evening and a certain compelling desire to ride side-saddle.

I will never stop hating horses for all that I must admit their necessity. When Vossler's vagary led us to consider this train heist I embraced it and very nearly him wholeheartedly, for it meant we could be rid of the stinking beasts for a time. For all that my schooling had included the skills of the hunt, never once did I have to tend to a horse before I had left home. That, as my father had oft-said, was what the _locals_ were for, captured and tamed as much as the horses, despite the obvious contradiction in his thought there — to have animals tend to animals.

My grudge towards the beasts may also be due to that I found myself in Vossler's service precisely because of a failed attempt to steal a horse, his horse, a nondescript-marked mare that he nevertheless seemed to love with all his being. The horse may well have been the only feminine thing he ever deigned to mount.

Which brings me back to where I began: the usual sparsity of both beautiful women and Viera in civilised clothes, and my current companion's seeming inability to notice today's exception.

This time through, Vossler and I travelled the frontier's long edge ensconced in second-class solitude legitimately. Even three years after the so-called end of the war, the risk of attack descending from the unbroken line of forestry that ran parallel to the train was enough to keep passenger numbers scarce. For those that did attempt to settle in this car, Vossler's scowl and cigar served to hasten them on. Nevertheless, as we were midway between the dining car and the sleepers, this car would serve its interstitial purpose whatever the qualities of his scowl. As Vossler directed his brooding out the window, occasionally taking a shot from his flask, I amused myself watching the other passengers pass by. I counted the uniformed Imperial soldiers, fresh-faced from the capital over the sea, or worn dry as the frontier itself, as they attempted to march two abreast down an aisle meant only for one.

When the pair of well-dressed strangers entered the car I noted in this very journal, some pages back:

Firstly. Despite that we had not stopped at a station for some days now, I had yet to see these two before. The scar that split the left brow of the gentleman was clearly visible despite that his hat and his beard strove to hide both face and scar. As that blond beard was prodigious enough for a child to have found shelter under it, it emphasised that I could not have overlooked him previously.

Secondly. The woman was clearly a Viera even with her features hidden in the shadow of her grand-brimmed hat. Her short-cropped hair was a pale blonde – or a dirty white? – a sharp disclaimer as to her origin. Still, such a thing should not have alerted me uncommonly, for the Viera boys were often captured young fresh from the trees and pressed into service, and she was indeed garbed as a youth, if in finery to match the bearded gentleman's richness. But not even a Viera boy had ever been that beautiful, and the way she moved was as slow as sin itself. Dressed like a man, she was the most desirable thing I had seen in years.

Thirdly. The revelation that my companion's motivation for his night-time demands upon my body may well have been out of preference instead of need. His eyes darted on the instant to the gentleman, wide, his face suddenly bleached and expressionless. Even when I ventured to draw his attention to the lady with a well placed and remarkably canny witticism, Vossler nevertheless remained, dare I say, captivated by the man, well after the point when the pair moved through our compartment and into the next.

'Shut your mouth for once, Archades,' Vossler said, the nickname persisting despite my explanation multiple times over that I had been born not more than a fortnight's hard ride from the frontier. 'You didn't see his face?'

'No, because I was too busy looking at _hers_.'

'Hers?' Vossler seemed bewildered. 'What?'

I rolled my eyes; I was rarely so ostentatious but sometimes Vossler missed subtlety. 'You worry me. The native woman accompanying the captivatingly bearded gentleman. Preceding him, and wearing a man's garb but clearly female.'

Vossler shook his head. ' _He_ wouldn't touch a woman,' he paused to drink, the knot of his throat bobbing against a day's worth of stubble, and continued somewhat more uncertainly, 'not one of the locals, anyway.'

Which did little to allay my newfound suspicions, but also sparked another concern, a more pressing one considering the reason for our presence on this suddenly interminable train journey.

'You know him?' I stopped myself from appending _intimately_ onto my question.

'Yes—' Vossler shook his head again, abruptly, dislodging the track of a thought. 'You don't recognise him?'

'Why should I? I don't have your predilection.'

'My _what_?' Vossler scowled, scuffing his bootheel against the floor in a restrained fit of pique. 'Where were you when the General won the Stand?'

Everyone knew of the Stand, at least, everyone on this side of the ocean and east of the tracks. Where had I been, those three years ago when the frontier's spine was broken: as far from the conflict which would determine the path of progress as it was possible to get. Engaged in my own process of dubious morality, I was bussing in a bar on the far-eastern edge of the continent.

I could never admit that to someone like Vossler, who very likely had fought in that war, for even the way he phrased his question made it more a challenge than a query. All true men had been at the Stand. I had read the papers. I knew the propaganda by rote.

Distance notwithstanding, everyone knew what happened when the General took yet lost the Stand. Widely publicised, and likewise celebrated, the word of that massacre and my own father's involvement set me on a bender that wiped out well over six weeks of my life, and terminated in a regrettable decision to steal Vossler's horse.

In a war where the dead accrued over decades, a single day doubled the numbers of all those who had fallen before. For the first time, the Imperial blood spilled exceeded theirs: treachery and massacre were paired flails to prompt the Viera's last, despairing vengeance. The army was broken, gone, those who were left much like Vossler, shattered and alone.

For all that the newspapers avowed the General won the war, I had yet to see the promised push westward even now, three years after the fact: we simply had lost too many. Archades's fledgling civilisation clung to the thread of the train across the continent, vulnerable, a leading edge held by a rusty nail. The lack of fertile landscape for open claim and the danger in working all but the most eastward of farms kept towns overcrowded, and dangerous, for shortages were common enough to spark my guilt at even casual theft.

Any kind of wall becomes too much like a prison when seen from the inside. No matter how the General's journalists kept singing of how close the Viera were to ceding the forest, I wasn't going to wait out my youth swaddled in a city's fortified stone blanket, dreaming of something as dubious as stability. My own kind caused me far more suffering than any native had. The massacre at the Stand was why men like Vossler and I did what we must to claim even our small kind of freedom, to ride where we willed, or, rather, where _he_ willed.

All of which meant that I did indeed understand and know the gentleman to whom Vossler alluded, if by reputation, rumour and reading only.

The treachery which had nearly lost the Stand and the war moments from being won had all been hung on one man's shoulders, if only for a short time. The man himself had been likewise hung, from the neck.

'I thought he was executed.'

'It was him,' Vossler insisted. 'Basch.'

At that, my suspicion truly flared, because anyone else would have called him 'Captain fon Ronsenburg,' if not 'that treacherous arse, may he rot to oblivion, and all his written works be plagiarised.'

I restrained myself. Vossler didn't like questions, and his supposition depended on a dead man walking. 'You think “Basch” might interfere with our intent?'

'I don't fucking know, Archades, do I look like some kind of fortune teller?'

'If it is the Captain, then I imagine he's wanting to keep a very low profile. Dead men and fugitives don't like company, from what I know.' Vengefully, 'You certainly hate it.'

'Why's he here then?'

'I'm no more a fortune teller than you. Why don't you wait and see, or, better yet, ask the man?' I stirred, lifted my hat from the bench beside me, intending to settle for another catnap seeing as there was nothing else to be done. Scarce had I placed the brim across my eyes than Vossler kicked my thigh, hard. Suede offered no protection from the metal tip on the thing; I swore at some length, until he kicked me silent again, this time with the heel.

'I'm not patient enough to wait and see. You go ask.'

'Find out yourself, if you know the man.'

'You're prettier. Go find out why they're here.' Vossler's expression was conflicted, as though he debated about grinning or grimacing; in the end, he decided on taking a generous mouthful from his whiskey flask. 'It's him, and he's a traitor, Archades; a fugitive, he'll be. Here for more than just travel. If they're going to cause problems -- we may have to move, quickly.'

I went mostly to get away from Vossler's iron irrationality, but as I walked down the aisle, rubbing the sting out of my thigh and lamenting yet another bruise, I brightened when I realised I might be able to get more information from the woman than the gentleman with her. I scarce noticed the speed of the tracks below as I stepped between cars, and continued onwards, finding the train marginally fuller the closer I came to the dining car. People watched as I passed, or didn't, depending on their level of boredom. I avoided meeting anyone's eyes until I reached the bar itself.

She was sitting alone in the darkest corner she could find, her hat pulled low over her eyes, the spread of her buttocks on the stool the only betrayal as to her gender. I carefully studied that portion of her anatomy as I approached, just to be sure I hadn't been mistaken, but if there was a tail it was well tucked from sight. I couldn't see the gentleman, Basch, if Vossler was right and not full of wishing as well as whiskey; it was unlikely I could have missed that phenomenal beard in such a contained space.

'Hello,' I said, as I sat next to the Viera. I re-settled my gun belt for comfort as I stretched my legs, for the thing always got in the way. 'Don't laugh, but my name's Ffamran. I can count beyond twenty without using my fingers, so they tell me I'm an accountant. The pleasure's all mine. May I buy you a drink?'

She smiled, tipped her hat in a greeting with a graceful motion. Immediately I felt strangely sick, and also sleepy, both signs of significant trauma to the skull.

Which is how I found myself here, neck aching from a blow from behind, securely locked in a cupboard far too shallow for my height, deprived of my gun, knives and lockpicks alike, and writing in my notebook for want of anything else to do.

As the writing of this makes clearly evident, the woman and 'Basch', as I must now deduce, did make the mistake of leaving in my pouch my pen, several rounds of shot, and a length of fuse for Vossler's stash of explosives. Past experience taught me how to dismantle a pen's nib to substitute as a lockpick; past experience also taught me it proves far easier to keep a spare set of lockpicks within my bootheel regardless, along with the basic ironwork required to unpeg most kinds of door hinge. Nevertheless, a large portion of common sense tells me to remain exactly where I am and let Vossler resolve his past with this walking treacherous ghost before I attempt anything, which is why I sit here, still writing.

Yet I can't help but remember the woman's smile, a nice one for all that it was her companion that blooded my scalp. Still, never let it be said that I would leave a woman waiting for a drink I offered, locks, cupboards or violently inclined, shirtlifting bearded gentlemen notwithstanding.

As an incidental decider, I am increasingly in need of a piss.


	2. Chapter 2

I found myself glad to have claimed both liberty and relief when I did and not any sooner, for Basch had tackled things sufficiently with Vossler to enable a swift resolution: I took myself out of the cupboard, cramped and mildly bruised, but nowhere near as bruised as Vossler.

Basch had also recognised Vossler on the instant of seeing him in that carriage, cigar, whiskey, stubble, and wide-brimmed hat aside, but on Basch the beard hid his shock of recognition better than Vossler's wide-eyed gape.

As I had often experienced when confronted with the sight of Vossler's stubble-afflicted face in the morning, Basch consequently suffered an interruption to his otherwise noted intelligence leading him to roughhouse me into a cupboard, and set about isolating Vossler to, strangely enough considering his willingness to resort to the physical with someone like myself, _talk_.

Talk between men like Basch and Vossler could only resolve in one way: it gives me great joy to note the bruise purpling across Vossler's cheekbone and eye as he nurses his schnapps, the shot clenched in an iron fist which had failed to land a single blow on the treacherous Captain Basch Van.

When I came upon them, it was after I had diligently searched the length of the train tail to head without finding sign of Vossler, Basch or of the local woman. I had even checked every locked luggage compartment in case they had done to Vossler what they had done to me. Vossler, being somewhat less resourceful than myself, may have then been somewhat in my debt for his freedom from the cupboard; I entertained myself with thoughts of his varied methods of recompense, but alas, he was not to be found restrained.

My thoroughness proved fortunate, however, for in the relative silence of a luggage compartment I head them over the rhythm of the tracks – the scuff of boot-heels on the _roof_ of the carriage.

The Viera held herself aloof, to one side, what I could see of her hair flashing silver in the settling sun. She offered me another quiet, compelling smile when I poked my head over the side. Vossler, chest heaving and sweating so that his stained shirt clung, was well on the losing end of this fight.

That was a surprise, possibly the first time I'd ever seen him at a disadvantage, for his mass held considerable muscle, if well-disguised beneath the layers of grog and poor food. I hesitated to take the last length of ladder to join them, for the woman's substantial boot-heels were a mere step away from where I would have to put my fingers.

Still, some sentiment towards witnessing Vossler's defeat drew me up. I climbed and avoided even looking at the guns the woman kept watch over, the ivory inlay of mine lying beside Vossler's worn wood.

Basch glanced over when I joined them, his hat lost to the train's wake, the tumultuous length of hair ripped free from his braid. Vossler had gone for the easiest grip, not unexpectedly considering the man's penchant for hair-pulling, but that may have been the only blow landed on Basch that I could see. Basch promptly delivered an undeserved knee to a gasping Vossler's ribcage -- I winced, vaguely sympathetic, while the woman tsked -- and Basch threw Vossler to the roof of the carriage, finished. He stepped back, wary, and grinned fit to split that prodigious beard.

'Damn you,' Vossler rasped, on his knees and unable to rise. He held a hand to his ribs, the bruise that would colour his eye already pinking. 'Basch – how is it possible – _why did you do it, you bastard?_ '

'Captain Basch fon Ronsenburg,' I interjected, loudly. I could see Basch's hand closing, another threatening fist despite his broad smile, and Vossler was defeated already. 'I believe we may have met just prior and yet I failed to introduce myself, an unforgivable oversight.'

Vossler looked at me, such hatred in his stare at my interruption I recoiled, then gathered myself. Of course he would be deploring that I, of all people, would witness his humiliation.

'In such circumstances,' I said blithely, 'the pleasure's all mine.'

Basch snorted and unclenched his fist. 'Captain no longer,' he said, in tones both more cultured and genial than I'd expected considering Vossler's daily crudity and hostility, and, of course, the blow to the back of my skull, 'a true gentleman never attempts to claim more than he has the right to. Who might you be?'

'Archades,' Vossler hissed, coming to one knee if not yet daring any further against the sway of the carriage and his unsteady head, 'if I have to tell you again I'll kill you. Shut your damned mouth and piss off.'

'Archades?' The Viera's brow lifted as did her tone, and I was startled to hear my sharp city accent reflected in her voice. 'You're fresh from Archades as well as an accountant, young man?'

I was bewildered again, to find that a local could possibly speak with an accent crisper than mine. I had been born here, on this frontier, my accent simply a bastard adoption from a string of tutors my father shipped in from Imperial Archades. What was her excuse, to speak so cultured, with wind pressing vest, shirt and loose trousers tight about her and showing those subtle structural differences between our races.

'Truly an accountant?' Basch laughed, booming against the wind, a warm twinkle in his eye as he surveyed me, neck to knee. He turned to the defeated subject. 'You delve some deep pits of scum to find your comfort, Vossler.'

Vossler snarled, wordless, staggering to his feet with his fists raised even though he could scarcely straighten. 'You can't talk about scum with your forest whore standing proud there, you treacherous—'

'Did I just hear you insult my wife--'

'Your what? Your _wife_!' Vossler spat, bloody, and fortunately downwind, for all it would have been amusing to see the result otherwise. Basch lunged forward, and they wrestled again, caught in a clinch that would have appeared comical if their momentum had not had them weave dangerously close to the edge.

'If I may interject,' I said, inching my way closer to the madam and the guns at her feet, 'shall we take this argument below? The train is almost about to round a curve, which, if I deduce correctly, will put us directly in the path of the smokestack's spend. I don't fancy conducting this argument with a decided lack of air to fuel it.'

'Don't consider it,' the woman said, wryly, and, with painstaking care, planted her boot atop the guns.

I smiled, apologetic. 'I consider only your comfort on this unstable surface, madam.'

'My comfort is not a dependent one, thank you.'

Basch slammed Vossler to his knees again, pinning Vossler to the camber of the carriage roof. I winced again, for the rage and humiliation on Vossler's face as he bent did not bode well for me later.

'As your lad there says, you have two choices.' Basch was genial, cocky. 'We can talk this out over white spirit, or we can settle this over schnapps. My fists are tired.'

'You arse.' Vossler writhed, pushed up until Basch released him, allowed him, and stood, shaking, red-faced. Basch had to pull him back from the edge, a hand fisted in his shirt. 'I can drink you under the table any day.'

'In which case you should be glad that I suggest we settle this over drinks. You might actually have a chance of beating me.'

Vossler spat, again downwind, but less bloody this time.

'Because,' Basch added, 'otherwise I'll break your damned stiff neck.'

Now, ensconced in the bar courtesy of Basch's generosity, the next round of schnapps has arrived. Peach, lamentably, as Vossler long drunk dry the apple -- nevertheless, I shall put my pen down and join them.


	3. Chapter 3

The talk which followed, though increasingly disjointed as the schnapps flowed freely thanks to the responsive pour of Basch's wife, Fran, served to enlighten me somewhat as to the character of my current companion, an unexpected aside to hearing Basch's tale.

What I knew of Basch prior to his supposed treachery at the Stand, I garnered from reading his numerous publications. He had been Imperially educated in much the same style as I had, his mother a member of Archades's elite -- as mine had been prior to her death -- and his father wealthy enough to buy her marriage, to ship her out to this, as the newspapers called it, 'frontier of progress, hope and discovery,' conveniently omitting the fact of daily raids and desperate shortages.

Evidently the first Lady fon Ronsenburg proved an adventurous woman, much like Fran now proved to be at Basch's side, but adventure did not avail her. She had died young -- as had my own mother, in childbirth -- and there did not exist a man who could hold a fon Ronsenburg son in check when he took an idea into his head.

'Only a woman holds that ability?' I did ask, wry, and Basch laughed for me, delighted. Fran met his intoxicated smile with fondness. Vossler quaffed his schnapps in one swallow so sharp I could hear it, and sucked steadily on his cigar.

The dubious exploits of Basch's youth began when he fled the turmoil which swallowed his father's frontier estate — at the age of sixteen, much as I had myself. Basch first met Vossler during his youthful travails when they both found themselves employed on the last leg of track construction for the great train, later to join the Imperial forces together.

As strange as it was to consider them having been in the employ of my father, it was unlikely they ever would have met him, serving as labour on the line. Eventually the pair of old soldiers relaxed enough over discussions of frontier towns now lost or grown, women had or hated, horses heisted and men equally well-hung. Vossler forgot, for the time it took him to down three more thimbles of schnapps, that he may have wanted to kill Basch not more than half a day ago.

As their conversation worked its steady way towards its target, Fran and myself sat mostly silent, observing. Vossler fired off poorly aimed accusations; as his questions fragmented, Basch merely grinned through impossible beard. Their exchanges were too swift for me to note all, but continued mostly along the lines of:

'—you betrayed them, seven thousand men, you led death to them—'

'Vossler. It wasn't me.'

'—the General depended on you, Basch –' and I noted then that Vossler's voice broke near every time he said the ex-Captain's name '—I depended on you, I was lost out there when you didn't close, what happened to the plan, and then after—'

'Vossler. _It wasn't me_.'

As Vossler slipped lower on the bench his questions crumpled as badly as his posture. He propped his chin on his hand, his elbow on the table, and looked as though about to fall asleep. Basch sat ram-rod straight on the other side of the table, but even his eyelids drooped, and he stroked at his beard, vague.

'Basch did not fight at the Stand,' Fran said, when Vossler's hand slipped that his chin cracked on the table. Basch's eyes flickered open at the sound, merely to drift closed again; his hand nevertheless closed firmly on his re-filled glass. Through blurred vision, Vossler saw then did the same, to his own, unwilling to admit defeat. By default, Vossler already had more than a bottleful of competitiveness in him, the schnapps merely a supplement to that fact.

'Ah, I see,' I said, and almost did. Imperial armour, even here on the frontier, hid the face, so the killer was always kept separate from the man. 'So who wore his armour?'

'No!' Vossler exploded upright, scowling, Basch startling awake. 'Impossible. Before we closed with the savages, the night before we engaged them, in the General's tent, I remember, Basch! You were there, it was you, you knew what was happening — you left me out there to die —'

'Vossler,' Basch said, 'I never took to the field. That was my betrayal, not— what happened. I refused to fight, for I had seen the tragedy which would come, and I could not have prevented it.'

Vossler backhanded his glass off the table, not deliberately, for I suspect if he had tried to aim he would have missed. I caught it almost without intention.

Fran raised an eyebrow. 'Quick hands, Archades.' 

Vossler fumbled the glass back out of my hand and thrust it forward, for more.

'Why didn't you just tell me what you were doing,' he mumbled, and as he weaved, unbalanced, he hit his head on my shoulder, hard enough that the recoil near had him sit upright again. 'I would have left with you.'

'I told the General,' Basch waved his hand in an apologetic pattern through the air. 'I told him I would never fight the locals like that. A massacre serves no purpose, said I, not for winning the day or winning a tomorrow. Co-existence is entirely possible; peace would have been within our reach, and for what other reason did I spend my years of working through the ranks but to research and write of the frontier, and those paths open for us to progress?'

'You only wanted to fight,' Vossler said, 'when we joined. You and I. I. I remember. Enlisting. We fought to keep the land free of the animals.'

'We were boys when we enlisted,' Basch rubbed his eyes, 'and however lusty for battle a boy may be, I like to think I had learned somewhat by the time I resigned. I discovered what our freedom would cost, and I did not want to pay the price.'

Basch's written works had been near as popular within the circle of my father's friends as his victories had been with the working men of the frontier, though where the latter had won Basch admiration, the former served only to earn him arguments held in his name; a name of slight sedition which later seemed to justify his entire betrayal.

Animals, my father did name the locals so that society near unanimously followed his adamant belief; and as animals proved well-bound within their native habitat, his supposition stated that if Archades felled the trees, the locals would die also. Therein lay the conflict provoking many a gentile argument within my father's luncheon gatherings, for Basch wrote of the locals not as animals, but men and women despite their animal aspects, the longer ears, the sharp teeth, the dangerous clawed fingers. Basch wrote of the path of a local's life with such soft supposition as to the nobility, the dignity and loss within their slow death at Imperial hands that it seemed strange he had also been so successful at killing so many of them, far more quickly than extinction.

Although I do not fight, I have heard that the measure of a man can only be taken when one witnesses how he conducts himself on the field; perhaps Basch did take the measure of the natives when he met them, blade against bow.

'And now _you_ don't fight, Basch?' Vossler snorted, and he prodded the swelling bruise of his eye hard enough that he winced.

'I will admit, wherever there are men and,' Basch smiled at Fran, and despite the alcoholic languor on his features and the unflattering cut of her male garb, her return smile was so full of love that I envied him most bitterly then, 'particularly, men and women, there will be fighting, and I am no natural philosopher to defy the nature of men. But not like that, Vossler. Not treachery; not murder. It was a treaty-signing; I would never, ever have turned my back on such to kill those who came to meet the General in peace, to sign.'

Their story continued. From labour on the line they shifted to defending the line. Their familiarity with the fight proven, they joined the frontier soldiers under the General once the track stalled, unable to progress for the plague of local protest. Together they worked their way from being soldiers to being Captains of significant detachments, holding at bay the locals who believed themselves to have a right to freedom from Imperial presence. The General, it came out, had engineered a staged treaty, the results of which would have decimated the majority of the local warriors gathered and their leaders in the bargain. 

Vossler had never availed himself of political knowledge. It was Basch who declined to fight and withdrew himself from the General's forces. The General found himself bereft of the man who inspired half the current guard to enlist. Because of Basch's defiance of his aristocratic birth, and his overwhelmingly accessible musings on the nature of war, borders, and the nobility of a frontiersman's lot against the gulf of that great green forest, he represented the very idea of a hope for freedom, for providence.

'The General must have been expecting your defection,' I insisted. 'If he had a double ready to take your place.' It was an Imperial trick, the doubles, concealed by Imperial masks and armour and so frequently referenced in literature I sighed to learn the tale held some truth. 'Some weeks in advance, a fortnight at the least.'

'Not just a pretty face this time,' Basch said, idly smiling at me. 'Well done, Vossler.'

Vossler thumped his fist on the table, sat up straight. 'Shut your mouth, Basch, or I'll have to say something really fucking rude about that…about that savage whore.'

'Call Fran by name,' I said, and flinched away when Vossler looked as though he would strike. 'Not savage. It's the barest of table manners to use someone's name before you call them something else, surely you can manage that much politeness?'

'S'also polite to have the family bitch sitting at the table.'

Fran laughed, melodic, her fingers playing with the short crop of her hair at the nape of her neck. 'Whore, or woman or wife, sir, whatever you'll call me, I am what I am.' With ample distaste, 'And _you_ are who you are.'

'More's the pity,' I added.

Vossler promised me vile vengeance with his eyes, once we were alone. I had to look away from the intensity in his eyes, forcing down the shudder.

This time it was Basch who poured another pair of full glasses. He looked at me across the table, and I was startled to see a dangerous sharpness therein; his sobriety piercing me. Strange, for experience had taught me that no one out-drank Vossler. Yet Vossler could scarcely continue his rage or his focus: he sat up momentarily before sliding to put his face into my shoulder again, this time remaining there, nestling. He mumbled something against the fabric, and sudden wet soaked through my sleeve.

'Shake him, will you?' Basch asked, and I complied, brisk. Vossler grumbled, and clutched at the tail of my hair hard enough that my head snapped back, and promptly started snoring. As I freed my hair from Vossler's sticky hand, Basch nodded, satisfied, and leaned across the table. Whatever drunkenness had plagued him washed away; his eyes were sharp.

'You may not be a traitor,' I said, startled, 'but you've won this battle by treachery.'

'Indeed,' Basch grinned, 'but sometimes treachery is necessary to avoid bloodshed, and I do not drink to excess, ever, lest that blood shed be my own. Now, young Archades who has never seen Archades, if you were still interested in this tale, shall we continue? You can convey this to your master in more succinct form when he recovers from his morning head.'

'Please do. I hope the story is worth the bruises you've earned me.'

A faint apology in Basch's tone. 'He did always have a vicious humour in the morning. I'd thought he would have outgrown it, these past years.'

'Your comrade may not have had your temperance to begin with,' Fran added, 'and if we are to finish this tale before sundown, I will tell the rest.' She gifted me another smile. 'Basch proves overly fond of the sound of his own voice.'

Even as Basch laughed, I said, 'A common enough complaint amongst frontiersmen and writers both, madam, when one spends long months with few and oft-times boring and uneducated companions.'

'So I see,' she said, wry, 'this verbosity proves quite an epidemic,' and I blushed, cursedly so.

Thus it did follow, in Fran's crisply accented voice that sparked in me a decidedly unusual yearning to see my father's estate again, that yes, the General had anticipated Basch's defection, because Basch had warned him off the current plan. Eight weeks prior to the planned sortie Basch had been undertaking reconnaissance, found himself ambushed by the locals as he dared to broach the line of the forest's perimeter. In the process of falling from his horse, fell head first into love.

'On the instant?'

'On the instant,' Basch agreed. 'Even quicker, if possible. Perhaps I loved her before I even knew her.'

'I've read everything you've ever written, Captain—'

'Basch,' he insisted. 'Please, be informal. And I'm flattered.'

'—and while there has always been a tendency towards pacifism and romanticism, even, say, idealisation of what is a fundamentally a lifestyle which can, pardon my informality, Fran, bite my arse—'

'Certainly,' Fran said, her accent as flawless as her features. 'But informality aside, we'll need more than a bottle of schnapps between the four of us before that.'

'—you,' and I admit I stuttered, and as Basch caught his wife's eyes and chortled, my face _flamed_ , 'intend me to believe that falling in love is enough for you to do an abrupt about-face on the entirety of your life's philosophy? Never did I think you would be a man to desert.'

Basch reached across the table, ignored my flinch, and gripped my wrist with a hand both warm and dry. 'When you fall in love, Archades,' he said, not smiling for once but with the sun-lines deep at the corners of his eyes, tight, possibly with sympathy, 'you'll know. You'll be willing to do more than change your philosophy. You may find yourself wanting to change the whole world, however dangerous that thought.'

Fran, as she explained, had been one of the local children gathered in the early days of Archades's campaign some twenty years ago, shipped to our long-distant motherland, adopted as an oddity, and raised as close to Imperial standards as possible for a child severed from her roots. She was examined by Archades's scientists and anthropologists to determine if there was indeed any basis of fact to the claim that these locals, with their long ears and clawed hands, animal pieces, could never be as intelligent as an Imperial son.

As she spoke, as briefly as she could on the cool violence inflicted upon her, so similar to the monstrous acts I had witnessed on my father's estate, I watched Basch's face turn hard. He poured himself a shot to drink for real. Fran laced her long fingers through his thick ones, drew his hand away from the glass, and kissed the callous of his knuckles.

'It's passed,' she said to him, softly. 'You have no need for that.'

'Nevertheless,' he said, a flicker of anger amongst what had proved, thus far, his boundless conviviality, 'someone's going to pay for. That.'

'Ah, and yet you look even this great gift in the mouth, Basch? If they hadn't taken me then, as a child, I would not have been there to catch you when you fell from your horse. I could not have broken you free of your imprisonment. And we would not be here now.'

At that, Basch stared at his glass, then pushed the schnapps to me. 'You have my cup, Archades. You look like you could use some hair on your chest. As is evident,' he brandished the length of his beard, 'I have more than enough.'

'Thank you.' I took his glass, and barely avoided saying 'sir.'

Though she did not mention it, I judged Fran's adoptive family must have been one of Archades's Highest, considering the crispness of her accent could have outmatched even my father's. Her “family” must have been high in royal favour to condone such an experiment, raising a foreigner as one of their own.

As she continued, it affirmed my suspicion, for of all the children taken, Fran had succeeded in shattering every expectation as to her abilities in any task set to her. In response to that shamelessly delivered affront, proving herself better than any Imperial, her adoptive family cut her off, ejected her, her sop of citizenship to Archades torn up.

'I came back,' Fran said, simply. 'A tale for another time. This was always my home, in my dreams. But when I returned, it proved my home no longer. For sixteen years I tried, but I could not…fit.'

'I am rather familiar with that,' I found myself saying, 'home seems more a memory than a place, at times.'

'Yes,' Basch agreed, 'but tread lightly down that path, Archades; nostalgia will backstab us all if we let it.'

Fran found some service as a translator between her childhood people and the Imperial negotiators, on the brutal dusty border where she adopted male dress for safety, for a woman would have been less heeded than even a native youth.

Home, in Fran's memory, was exactly that; the right to be, to be heeded, and to be safe. She served on behalf of the locals in negotiating the General's great treaty offer, and was thus present when her people took Basch on his reconnaissance mission. They recognised him as the General's Captain, and would have killed him in thoughtless vengeance for past deaths if not for her. Instead, she preserved him, spoke to him, and presumably fell in love also.

'So,' I changed the course of the conversation, as all the talk of love was somewhat disconcerting, 'Vossler was the General's second also?'

Basch gave me another sharp look, his jaw clenching briefly. 'He never told you?'

'Nothing. He's never liked questions.'

'So he hasn't told you what happened after I left? I wondered how if he had survived—'

'He barely bids me good morning, Basch.' 

Together, in the months before the treaty's signing, Basch and Fran performed whatever confluence essential to reform a man and fire up a woman's passion. Basch went to the General with knowledge of the unexpectedly vast numbers of local warriors, stating the desire for secret massacre would not fall out as the General had planned. Instead, Basch spoke of the local delight with regards to the proposed treaty: compromise was indeed possible. Basch was in love, and wanted to change the world. Though, he admitted, Fran had tried to warn him of the folly of such, for all she had ever sought was peace for herself.

Over the course of a fortnight, the General proved genial, accepting, willing to change his process if somewhat vague about how and when despite Basch's pressing arguments, and he even witnessed the marriage of Basch and Fran before his very own Imperial lawyer. His only request was that Basch would not tell the men of the change in plans, nor to tell them of Basch's resignation; for morale.

This gave the General time to find a double to fill Basch' armour, to have his men take and kill Fran, and to truss Basch up and take him away to prison for insurgency and an ominous sounding reeducation. It seemed the General was unwilling to waste resources out here, or he would have killed Basch as well.

'I escaped,' Fran said.

'I didn't,' Basch rubbed the scar that split his eyebrow and cheek, absently. His hand shook, almost imperceptibly but that I was looking for it.

'Until I found out where he was being kept,' Fran added. 'And then I broke him out.'

'Resourceful. So how did you fake being hung?'

'I didn't,' Basch said, again, and sighed. 'The General hung my double. Scapegoat, hells. The poor sod didn't deserve that, even for leading a bloody massacre.'

Because even an Imperial cipher was a man: when the unnamed double took Basch's command, unknowingly the General unleashed seven levels of insanity on the men of the frontier. The General had not anticipated what instant obedience and layered ignorance would do to a man wearing a hero's armour. Unable to understand any of the signals the flanks used to communicate with each other, Basch's double directed his men into insanity, left Vossler's flank exposed to the retaliatory lash of fleeing locals, and plunged the battlefield into murderous chaos.

'For that treachery,' Basch said, heavily, 'for the deaths of seven thousand of our men, the poor bastard was executed like a dog. To be honest, I had thought Vossler died in that battle for I heard no word of him after, only rumour that his flank had been killed to a man. Hence, my curiosity to see how he survived. To see him here shocked me, as shocked as he was to see me. Dead men walking, the pair of us, though his rebirth seems less kind an incarnation than mine.'

I was suddenly conscious of the press of Vossler's gut against my arm, rising and falling with the sound of his soft snore. The sun scarcely scraped the horizon's line and already he had knocked himself out. I couldn't meet Basch's eyes lest therein hold too much pity.

'I'm afraid you'll have to ask him his story in person,' I knew this next sounded too apologetic; 'I've only…travelled with him for these past two years, and he was…as you now see him.'

'Near as long as Basch and I have been travelling,' Fran said into that awkwardness. 'Searching, I will admit. We long to find friends amidst the desolation of this frontier, for it seems neither of us will be content with our own peace of mind unless others share it also.'

'And you, Archades?' Basch asked, before I could phrase a thought into speech, 'What brings you here? No figures to be tallying upon on a train, I would have thought.'

'Well, I—we—there's—when I said I was an accountant, I…meant rather…I'm…we're involved in…moving money around. So sort of accounting. So to speak.'

I did embarrass myself then, pinned under their paired gazes and with Vossler drooling what smelled like eighty percent proof on my shoulder. Basch had been more than a hero throughout my boyhood both for his willing mastery of the word as well as the gun and sword. When word of his execution and the reason for it reached where I was working, I don't know why it broke me as it did.

Here, under Basch's steady gaze, I found myself not wanting to admit how I had lowered myself to this life of immorality when he had not. The first steps on my dark path, well away from whatever aspiration my father had held for me or I for myself, proved by far the easiest. It was my sheer callous will to think I would not call myself to account for this arc of decay.

And here, on this train, one my father had designed, financed, built: to find both Basch's death and his treachery nothing more than an elaborate trick played upon me, and to find at his side a woman who I will say again, shamelessly, is one of the most beautiful women I have ever encountered, and now that I know her better I know it's _not_ scarcity that prompts that comparison—

'Archades's quite delightful when he lies,' Fran observed, with a gentle smile; Basch nodded, agreeably, but I think the man could do nothing not agreeable.

'Come on then, lad, I'll help you carry your master back to your cabin, and I've no doubt he'll seek me out on the morrow for more of the same.'

Now, on his lower bunk, Vossler's groaning, kicking off the blanket, evidently groping for consciousness again. He flings off the wet cloth I'd put over his black eye for want of any ice. I have to stop writing and tend to him.


	4. Chapter 4

Which is how I found myself having lost a whole sunset, a dawn, almost a tooth, and significant portions of the morning after. I lamented that the sleeper held only a tiny mirror, for I had to squint into it to ascertain if bleeding the knot that closed my right eye would help or not. I also needed a shave, but that was scarcely important.

'You look at yourself too much,' Vossler rasped, stirring on his bunk. I ignored him and pulled my knife from where my pants lay crumpled on the floor. 'What the hell happened to your eye?'

'If you'd wanted us to match,' I slashed the lump, once, sharply, 'we could've considered matching hats or something. Matching guns, perhaps. Trousers in the same shade of suede.'

The bleeding helped, the lump easing; I stretched my eyebrow up, blinked a few times, and wiped away the trickle on the cuff of my ripped shirt, the only part of it not stained with the unmentionable.

If there was anything complimentary to be said about Vossler when drunk, it was that he persisted through whatever adversity he found in his way.

He was growling as he tried to sit, clutching at his head. I had to grin into the mirror as I bound back my hair.

'Put some clothes on, you look like a whore bent over naked like that. Like a fucking invitation. What if someone came in? And it's noisy enough already, shut the damned window.'

'Someone, as in, your best friend Basch? He's too polite to go around, I don't know, _forcing_ his way in without an invitation. I need your spare clothes before I can get dressed. And you'd probably prefer it if I kept the window open, but with you, I never know sometimes.'

Vossler rose too abruptly at that, cracking his head on the upper bunk. He swore fit to turn the air blue, silenced himself as surveyed the ruins of the sleeper and my clothes, and said, almost ashamedly, 'Shit. Sorry, kid.'

Ask for forgiveness, or ask for permission. There was never any question as to which path Vossler would prefer.

None of these usual, even monotonous circumstances I would ordinarily chronicle in such sordid glory, but it may explain why that day Vossler held his usually vicious temper in tight check for as long as he could, and listened to me with every sign of attentive care as I expanded on the rest of what Basch and Fran had said the day before.

It may also explain why, when I said: 'I trust him, I suppose; the tale about the double is too raw for it to be a lie,' Vossler merely nodded, nursed his mid-morning whiskey, and looked somewhat less sullen than usual.

'Can't believe the bastard got married, though,' Vossler mumbled into his drink. 'To a—'

'Fran,' I interrupted. 'Whatever you were going to say, her name's Fran, and get it right.'

'Or what, you're going to defend her honour?' He slurped another mouthful, noisily. 'Archades' in love.'

'And you're a fat old drunk, Vossler, and from what Basch says of your seven thousand dead to a man, probably more a deserter than he. So you shut up this time, because she's another man's _wife_.'

He didn't say a word, not a one. I wondered how closely I'd hit the target. He finished his drink and I finished my belated breakfast, a decidedly large one considering what I usually ate. He watched me shovel eggs on toast with an expression almost like trepidation, and, but for the ever-present sound of the train, in silence.

'So why are they here?' he asked, eventually. 'Did you find out that much?'

'Travelling. Idealistically. Searching for peace of mind; some sort of change.'

'Right, and unless you mean spare change, I'm a saint.'

'Of what, lonely frontiersmen?'

'Fuck you,' he exploded, 'I apologised, didn't I?'

'If you must know, I think they're here for the same reason we are. Even idealistic change needs funding, after all, and look at their clothes: they are travelling in somewhat grand style. I imagine they need some source of cash to sustain such, and I doubt our dearly deceased Captain fon Ronsenburg has any access to his family's wealth.'

Vossler poked his head out of the booth, glanced up and back the length of the empty car — it was well past breakfast, after all, and second class barely had the comfort of first to keep people lingering. 'Do you _know_ that or do you think?'

'I think. Which is more than you do, admittedly.'

It almost felt good when he punched my arm. I was starting to worry he'd apologised himself into new territory and couldn't find his way back.

'Sixty thousand,' he said, reverently. 'It's our sixty thousand.'

'Sixty thousand is a lot of change on the frontier.'

He shook his head. 'A lot of imported spirits for me and for you, a lot of…books?'

'Maybe.' I shrugged away from the question, uncomfortable. What exactly I was to do with my wealth, apart from get as far away from Vossler as I could, I did not know.

The rest of the day progressed in a shaky truce, even once Basch and Fran invited us through to first class for a significantly larger and better quality of lunch.

The ambiguity of my 'maybe' then brings me back to this, again, as though I would wind this same path forever: for why am I here?

'Here' is curled against the side of the car, watching Vossler and Basch play a round. Basch has a royal, if I'd kept count correctly, Vossler only a trio, and habit has me tap my pen in a seeming irregular pattern so that Vossler knows he should fold. But 'here' is also _here_ , living a life of dubious morality on the frontier when I could have been ensconced in civilian comfort to the east, or even shipped myself back to Archades to pursue a fortune, married by now and progressing a life planned from start to finish with as much efficiency as my father had planned his conquest of the continent.

Much as the locals and their great green forest succeeded in disrupting that latter plan of my father's, it was likewise a local girl who disrupted his plan for me. Perhaps sentiment keeps me returning here when I could be elsewhere, working or merely absent and on my father's retainer. Here, to this edge of wilderness abutting a fragmented civilisation. But even forgetting the 'why' of my presence — for 'what' I can't determine. I find nothing I want, and I wonder if gold and silver can truly buy nothingness.

The problem with cheating at cards is that no matter how good a man gets, he can't stay in one town. I met Vossler at the tail end of a too-long run of good luck and cold disregard, when I stole his horse to get out of town in a hurry and failed to take into account how much some men loved their horses. Raging drunk and still a fighter for all his bulk and age, he found me in the next town and nearly killed me before I'd managed to cough out a deal. Insultingly enough, he not only let me live, he even took me before a lawyer and made me vow on my dead mother's grave: I would abide by my word to his service. Strange, he knew even then, it was a vow that would keep me, my word the last thing left to me to honour. 

But then, Vossler wasn't stupid no matter how much I liked to dig at him; he was the one that worked out the first code for the hustle.

 _You look like a teacher,_ he'd told me, dismissively, _or an accountant, and you're too young, so stay away from the tables_. I would sit somewhere within eyeshot, usually in the upper galley, writing whatever I felt like, and he played. Pen taps if we were close and in a saloon with sufficient piano-play to hide the sound, yawns covered with a hand with a range of finger signals extended if too far away for him to see my pen. We lost enough that we could settle safely in separate rooms for a couple of days and learn the marks, without fear of retribution, before the last day when we would clear out the gamblers of everything they owned.

Not a bad life, for all the travel involved. It couldn't last: the threat of discovery was always there. Nothing was forever, not on this frontier, for the unchanging, unbroachable forest swallowed our forevers to maintain its own.

The forest, a line of green that stretched north and south, impassable; the train curved along that unbreakable edge, a lifeline to which we all clung, clustered, as though to an umbilical. Unless Vossler and I travelled by a train, that necessary journey between towns was a loss of four days on horseback at a minimum. Expenditure on bullets, fodder, the like kept us barely on survival rations. In fact, if Vossler had just stopped with his whiskey he probably would have kept his musculature closer to Basch's instead of appearing half-way into his twilight years, for the trail was hard enough, and he fought where I would not. As the train was so much quicker, it would have meant less food, getting rid of the horses and reducing the risk of attack between towns, yet, one thing did stop us and it wasn't my dislike for my father's mechanical presence. After the privations of the war, the trains remaining ran too infrequent for our lifestyle. Too often we had to leave quickly and on the instant, generally with someone trussed and quite angry behind us, for whatever Vossler expected I couldn't bring myself to kill a man in cold blood, or even throw a punch; I would not let myself descend further into crude immorality.

On the subject Vossler's expectation, his way of staying warm at night near broke me, that first, with the shock of it, but regardless of that, I knew enough of the hardship of the terrain to know that such service was expected out here along with the maintenance of his gear, the care of his horse, everything that my youth and complicit moment of avowed-and-witnessed stupidity let me in for; of it all, it was Vossler's laundry that really did me in. Never had I need to learn to sew beyond fastening a loose button before. I swear the man ripped his shirts merely to spite me, either that, or wrestled with demons in his sleep.

The train we were now on is one that stops even more infrequently, with days between towns and a full two compartments taken up by more of the General's armed men. The sole reason for both deviations is thus: this train carries the weight of over-hard government tithes, currently, if my calculations are correct, sixty thousand dollars worth. If we wait for another stop before we make our move, it'll be closer to eighty.

On a playing field as spatially restricted as a train there are options for dealing with such an imbalance of numbers, two against those two full sleepers of men. They are unwary, for it's the isolation that protects the gold from inward attack out here, the thought of a thief having nowhere to go but into the green, for word would invariably catch a thief at his ease in the closest town. But distance does not daunt us; both Vossler and I have survived out here, in the desolation between towns and in the great green also, for much longer periods of time than we have ever lived under a roof. We'll take the cash, and go to ground for long enough that the word will die down, and planning has gone into setting up caches of food and shelter for that exact purpose. We could get away with this; never have to tempt Fate again. I could even buy a house, and a wife, and possibly even a horse solely for the purpose of shooting it; maybe for the right price, Vossler would even let me shoot his horse.

And that should be sufficient reason as to 'why' I am 'here'.

Even as I write that, I know it is not enough.

As Basch says, nostalgia could backstab us, but daydreams don't bother with being subversive. They just punch you in the face.

Basch was, is, a hero; he makes me nostalgic, if that's the word. Envious, if it's not. Whatever Basch says about love, I remember wanting to change the world too, and it wasn't love that motivated me.

I have written on my father's expectation. At some point it was my expectation also. My life was planned along lines as clear as a train's tracks. Before my birth my father carved the world into east and west with his railroad, a line on which one side sat civilisation and on the other, the great green which swallowed men and dreams alike. A marker for progress, for victory, that track which unfurled north and south; as it went another kind of victory was claimed with each mile of forest taken inland, and slowly, a clear line of progress inched westward as well.

This was how my father thought life should be: a clear division, them and us, he and she, you and they. The day I left, I ran west, for everything east and north and south was his. He gave me no choice, he had my middle brother put the whip in my hand and my eldest brother held the knife in front of me; I remember how the girl even pulled the wave of her hair away from the curve of her back, so well trained my father had her. So well trained he had us, to think that we had the right to do this, even to each other. So well trained the girl hadn't said no when I took her the night before, that I'd thought, maybe, she'd actually wanted me.

I recall, not much, of that day, but the image that refuses to leave me is how the tips of her ears dragged in the dirt.

I regret the scars across my own shoulders, daily, still rough against whatever shirt I wear; a trade for my refusal to lift my hand, yet such lines define us, much as they define the each frontier, lines crossed, boundaries broached. Tracks, link and divide, progress that merely chains, for along it we are only permitted travel directly. There is no lateral progress, no sideways motion, only forward, and back, forward, back, and all we can do is watch what we might have had slide by, that we travel, again, the same route, and always. I hadn't needed love to want to change the way things were. I daresay it was spite that motivated me.

-which may have been why, despite whatever nobility engendered my first efforts to leave my father household, to spurn his retainer, I found myself alternating between card-sharking in saloons and opening to Vossler's lust rather than travelling in first class finery with a woman like Fran opening to me.

'This game bores me,' Fran said, that I write as she goes to get our guns. 'Once one determines how to count the cards, it's pointlessly simple. I think I'll go sit on top.'

'Don't shoot too many signs,' Basch said, smiling up at her, and her fingertips brushed across the back of his hand, a familiar enough farewell that I wonder if I will ever find such comfort in the touch of another. 'We'll need the bullets for later.'

'You want to join me, Archades?'

'Alas,' I said, 'you seem to have kept my gun from the other day, madam.'

'I have, haven't I? I'll go and get it. The ivory, was it not? Meet me up top of the luggage compartment, the one whose acquaintance you made so recently, courtesy of Basch's mildly abrupt introduction.'

I had to smile at that. 'I look forward to it.'

Vossler looked at me with an expression that I couldn't define at the time; dread, very possibly, or panic. I frowned at him, and he looked back at his cards so swiftly it was almost a flinch.

'Now I'll see how well Vossler plays without his lucky charm,' Basch said, as close to gloating as he ever would get.

'Poorly,' I couldn't resist saying as I made my way past, and ruffled Vossler's hair. With Basch there, Vossler could scarcely retaliate without destroying this perception of him on his best behaviour. 'I'll see you at tea. Save me a plate, I'm feeling incredibly hungry for some reason.'

'To fill those out,' Basch said, eying the loose hang of Vossler's oversized shirt on me, 'you'll need to eat a horse.'

'As long as I'm the one that gets to shoot it first.'

Fran's ears proceed her up the side of the car; I refrain from staring, and note instead how the silver of her short-cut hair stains gold in the imminent sunset. She has my gun cradled in her arms, the ivory against her breast, so I will uncurl from around my notebook and tuck it away against the pull of the wind, and shoot at signs with Fran, and decidedly not write anything resembling poetry.


	5. Chapter 5

Because, of course, poetry would not do her justice.

Not even Vossler matched my skill with firearms; the man knew how to use them but didn't understand the mechanism, and only through understanding and awareness can a man truly know what he does. In those many moments of boredom we tested each other, but he ignored the slight nuances of an individual gun, the care required for every part to ensure the gun shot true instead of on the wings of Fate. He never even paid more than the slightest attention to the wind, despite my loud lamentation.

The third time Fran threaded her own shot through the ragged hole left by mine, just before the sign drew out of range, I rolled onto my back, stared at the orange-stained sky and admitted: 'Very well then, I saw that one pass. Congratulations, madam, you've matched me.'

Her grin was soft rather than triumphant; she wriggled over on her stomach so I could see her face in my periphery, elbows rather close to my arm, and touched my hand. The warmth almost burned; the wind had chilled my fingers. 'Such a stiff neck, Archades?'

'It's one of the few things I had a knack for,' and as I continued, I wondered myself mad or drunk or worse; not even Vossler knew this much about me. 'Firearms, not stiff-necking. The youngest of three sons, I did get rather possessive over things I was allowed to be good at.'

'Firstly, counting,' she said, ticking it off on one hand, 'secondly, firearms, thirdly, smiling—'

'Smiling?'

'Invariably the most charming I've ever seen,' she said, 'it's no wonder no one trusts you.'

'I'm flattered and insulted both at once. Well done again.'

She held her three fingers in front of her eyes, and looked at me through their fan. '—but not dodging.'

'No.'

'Or blocking.'

'I'm even worse at that.'

'If you wish,' she said, hesitant, and, tentative, she very nearly touched the bruise at my eye before I flinched away, 'Basch will speak to him—'

I had to laugh at her; a ridiculous statement, for what would I do then when Basch wasn't around? 'Madam, I appreciate the sentiment but I consider that I earn every bruise on my skin because, as you say, I haven't yet learned to dodge or block what life throws at me. One day, perhaps I will, and the prize will be the very sanctity of my skin.'

Archades,' Fran said, thoughtful, 'you're wasted out here.'

Nothing warned me of this; nevertheless, she kissed me, if only on the brow. It felt almost maternal. Immorality seemed to be my cross to bear alone; my thoughts turned quicker than the kiss itself.

She was another man's wife. Not just any man but one that, having only met him in the flesh a day past I may very well have sold my soul for, for he was everything I ever wanted to be when I had defined myself solely by who I would not become. My gun was still across my chest, a weight, and loaded, and over its warmth and the scent of explosives I could feel her warmth, and smell her scent, like cinnamon, and all I could think of was that at his sober best, Vossler smelled like horse and cigars; and as Fran's lips left my brow I couldn't let her leave, for it just wasn't enough.

Fran gasped when I rolled to pin her, my gun hard up between us and fortunately so, for it may have hid what else was hard up between us, yet, despite my swiftness there, my lips were reserved. A gentle kiss, when I wanted to devour her. She stilled at that, stopped struggling, and I felt her heartbeat racing. I bowed my neck, that our brows met and shorter strands of my hair fell forward. I matched the corners of our eyes together, nose to nose, lips to lips, didn't kiss her again. She blinked, and the path of her eyelashes was another kind of kiss. Butterfly kisses, the girl on my father's estate had called it, her eye to my cheek, fluttering.

'I'm so sorry,' I said, and still, couldn't move. She felt unbelievably good under me. Even the slow sway of the train made it so much better.

‘Archades,' she whispered that the train's motion nearly stole her words, but that her lips moved against mine, 'have you never…with a woman…'

'Of course I have, don't be daft.'

Her breath slowed; her heartbeat began to settle now this read less like her imminent rape and more like my mortification, complete with rigour.

'Once.'

'Ah,' was all she said.

'I was sixteen.'

'I see.'

'It was quick.'

'I can imagine.'

'Please don't. Imagine.'

'Have you not…’ She tried to be wry. ‘You know there are brothels everywhere…'

'I would never, ever approach a woman if there was even the slightest suggestion that she might not be entirely willing, and in my worldly opinion, gold instantly makes her willingness suspect.'

‘Archades,' she said, and she was throaty, hoarse, amused, and thankfully said nothing about my position still on top of her, 'you truly are wasted out here, accountant or other. Why are you out here, again?'

Strange that one casual question could sour what would otherwise be a mostly treasured memory, embarrassment aside. All I could think was of my earlier assertion to Vossler: that Fran and Basch must be here for the same purpose we were, to rob the train. For whatever reason that rankled. Not only was Basch everything I wanted to be, he had everything I wanted, and now he threatened to take away from me the one thing that might give me some small surcease from this grinding life over the next few years. I could ride trains for years, never to see a horse, but not if Basch robbed the train first.

All I could think, then, was that the man set his wife on me to shake me for information on Vossler. I may have hated Basch a little, then.

'Why,' I said, and rolled away from her, 'the scenery, of course. Why are you out here?'

Fran curled away, reached for her own gun, and ran her fingers through her hair and up along her ears. As she stood, I didn't know how anyone could have assumed she was male regardless of her garb. She had too many curves, and the way she moved, slow, with such a precise balance and placement of her feet; it was seduction itself, challenging, confident, competent all at once.

'I like trains,' she said, almost deviously despite the innocence of her smile. 'Magnificent symbols of progress against all this boundless savagery.'

'Ah. Of course. Never mind that the very nature of a train requires that it must invariably backtrack. Such a magnificent symbol of progress.'

She lost her smile at that, replaced by an expression more quizzical than anything else.

At tea, the four of us ate in silence despite Basch's gallant attempts to converse; under what almost looked like Vossler's guilt-ridden misery, I succeeded in eating myself almost to the point of being sick, and retired early to finish writing this.


	6. Chapter 6

Yes, it proved guilt that drove Vossler's pointed glances during that day, guilt or even something stranger that I can't consider. Whatever it was, it also kept his silence through tea. When he stumbled into the sleeper, I could smell the stink of spirits and cigar-smoke before he stepped through the door.

He stood below, groped along the top bunk, blind, to hit my groin hard enough that I cringed, and as he patted along me, still fully clad, he slurred: 'If you don't want to fuck, you don't have to eat your own weight in food to make your damned point.'

'What would you suggest I do instead, ask nicely? Because I will remind you that last night I protested with as much eloquence as I-'

His sigh was heavy in the dark; the clench of his fist in the blankets silenced me. 'Basch thinks I starve you now,' Vossler said, mournful. 'He said sharp words. Very sharp.'

I couldn't help it; I laughed.

He pulled me off the bunk by the simple pretext of ripping the mattress out from under me; he caught me, fell, and we crashed into the opposite wall. Something shattered, the mirror as I discovered the next morning; the door jarred half open, and I nearly cracked my skull. The pain from a smashed elbow had me gasping; under me, Vossler had cushioned the worst of it, growling curses blurred enough that I couldn't understand them. He sounded almost like he was on the verge of tears, however incongruous that seemed. He moved, heaved under me, and I saw one of his arms snake out to slide the door shut again, to leave us in the dark.

He kicked my legs out as I tried to stand, grabbed me by the waistband before I hit the floor, lifting. My shins cracked against the side of his bunk, and I lamented the oversized fit of his borrowed spare pair of pants, because not even my belt held them up when he pulled. Thus hobbled at the ankles, he pushed me onto the bed.

Yet, strangely, he did not press where I expected but rather pulled, so I half fell off the edge, and rolled me over to face him.

'Vossler,' I asked, as levelly as I could as he ripped at my undergarments, 'what are you trying to do, and may I suggest that whatever it is, we don't do it on a mattress you need to sleep on?'

'Shut up,' he said, kneeling before me, the wire of his hair against my stomach, his forehead on my thighs, and he sobbed, 'shut up, why do you have to talk so much, I keep asking and asking you to shut up, just shut up, please.'

It was the please that did it, that I lifted my hips despite myself, so he could strip me; when he managed to get my undergarments down he wormed closer, pressed his chest against my shins, and palmed me. 'Soft,' he said, almost broken, his breath heavy on my thigh, 'you really don't…want…'

He mouthed me, that I marvelled, tongue along my flesh with a quick swipe before he swallowed me, working swift enough that his lips touched the hair at my groin before my own rapid lust made that depth impossible for him; nevertheless he tried until he choked, and I felt his throat close. I fell as I tried to arch up, backwards, to resoundingly crack my head against the wall; after the previous collisions and whatever noise we'd made the night before it seemed the neighbouring sleeper had had enough, for they kicked the wall in return and screamed something incomprehensible and threatening –

The noise then came from me, an involuntary embarrassing whine, for Vossler pulled away. He left me wet, cold against the air, though he kept his hand on my thigh with his palm hot and sweaty; with his other hand he groped at the chair until he grasped my gun. He wrapped my hands around it, pointed it at the door. 'If someone comes in,' he said, hoarse, 'I don't care who, shoot them.'

I speculated for a moment if he was at all concerned for our safety from the sleepers next door, and eventually decided that he was more concerned that someone would see him with his mouth on me, for all the willingness his vigour suggested. Either that, or he liked guns, for after a time he ducked his head under the length that the metal shaft lay across the nape of his neck, and drew me into his mouth again, roughly, that I felt teeth and tongue all. Thoughtless, and with one hand holding the shaft of the gun on either side of his skull, I held it closer so he couldn't pull back so far; he moaned.

At that point irrationality had me forget that I would have to face him on the morrow, so I jerked the gun tight across his nape, lifted my hips up that his fingers dug viciously into my thigh; I think I saw stars in that darkness; I definitely felt his throat again, for it proved substantially smoother than the roof of his mouth. The motion of his head, however restricted, had me bucking that the slats creaked in time with our breath, counterpoint to the train's ever-present sound; yet, this, an oddity, for when I realised what the other sound was, flesh against flesh, fabric rustling – him, tasking himself – I couldn't hold it back however I wished to make this last all night. I think I may have choked out his name, let the gun up so he could pull back, but instead, he lunged forward, and as he exhaled, he finished the both of us, abruptly.

He came hot along my shin, and when he drew back I wondered – then realised he must have swallowed, for he pressed his lips to my thigh, wet only with spit.

'Vossler,' I said, for sure that time.

He bit my leg hard enough that I yelped, and said, 'You make more noise this way than the other, Archades. Now shove over, I want to pass out and forget this.'

I started to roll myself out of the bunk, intending to rise to my own above, but he pushed me forcefully back, growling, 'I said shove over, not get up and leave. Don't you dare leave.'

'I'm not leaving,' I said, still vaguely stunned from the varied and numerous head-blows; he curled himself around me tightly, knee bent behind mine, my face against the wall that I could feel the grain of the paint against my forehead. His breath against my neck was heavy with alcohol, tickling on the exhale, and the weight of his arm near stifling across my shoulders, as unbending as iron.

Nevertheless, I must have slept. When I woke I was in the same position, cramped and with very cold thighs, still with my trousers around my ankles, come dried on my shin, and an unbelievably pressing need to find my way to a bathroom considering the expansive menu I'd put away the night before. Vossler didn't wake, still snoring quietly; before I left some sentiment had me tuck the unbuttoned halves of his shirt closed over the hair on his chest. It looked almost indecent to see him that close to naked.

As I finish writing this, notebook across my bare knees, I find myself contemplating the bite he left on my thigh, and wondering at what he thought to prove.


	7. Chapter 7

It's taken me near half a day to find myself space to write again, and it's back in our compartment, curled on sheets that still smell of Vossler's sweat that I have to do so. He's been insistent all day, maddeningly, irrationally so, for we're too close to a town to do it here. Our conversations have been painfully repetitive:

'Today,' he said, his eyes bloodshot, 'we'll take it now.'

'Vossler, we went through this before. The next stop's only a day away. We're going to wait until after we leave the town, and when we're at a midpoint between stops we'll make a move. Just like the plan. You do remember the plan, right?'

'If I say we do it now, we do it now.'

'Sure. And seeing as you know how to safely set and explode a detonator, and that you're in fine fighting form for climbing around the underside of a moving carriage, I'll just sit back here with my feet up and allow your unimpaired judgement not kill us all with impatience.'

He scowled at me, squinting, and restrained himself from further articulation for a time. I watched his fist clench on the table between us, unclench, clench, impotently.

'We have to do it now,' he said, plaintive, 'Because of Basch being here. Otherwise I'd wait.'

'You think he's going to get in first, and in the span of a day?'

'You said they got on the train out in the middle of nowhere. Probably rode up and got on, I've done that before.' He paused, that I could see the path of his thought groping, vaguely; a surge of something almost resembling pity near closed my throat. 'That means something, I'm sure.'

'...that there's something between where they got on and where the next stop is, if not the next stop itself,' I said, for him, and he nodded once.

'Yeah, right. So we have to do it now, or he'll—' Vossler shook his flask as he raised it to his lips; only a mouthful was left, echoing. 'I can't stand being around him,' Vossler said, and without warning, flung his flask across the table. I caught it before it hit me in the face.

'He's not that bad for company. An intelligent conversationalist, for once.'

'I can't stand you being around him. I can't stand that forest-fuck he calls his wife, always smiling, and don't think I don't see the way she smiles at you, and the way you smile at him, the way you all look at me, with pity,' he spat, 'pity, fucking pity from a pair of whores; he married a fur-eared whore, and I don't even know what you are any more. I can't stand the way he thinks, he pretends nothing's changed, even though he died, he's dead. I mourned for months, Archades, months of being as dead as he, and he thinks it means nothing –'

In the end I threw his flask back at him; it smacked him full in the face. In retrospect, the expression it left there made me somewhat remorseful; I never liked having to use violence to win an argument.

'And you wonder why I think he's better company than you,' I said, as I stood.

He glowered at me from under lowered brows. 'If you fuck either of them I'm going to kill you.'

'You couldn't even kill yourself if I gave you a loaded gun and pointed it in the right direction, you arse.'

'But I'm dead already,' he said. 'I died there, with green in the air and the stink of blood and shit on me, and the savages were howling, men and women and even,' his hand waved, at shoulder height, patting nothing aimlessly, 'fuzzy-eared little children with knives and bows and God and killing us. My men were running, bastards, running, and I couldn't. Because I saw. Him. Fate's own lord, that he twists the word and the world to his whim. On the other side of the leading edge, blonde and blazing; what was I to do but die, and crawl in the guts that someone else had spilled, someone else's blood in my mouth, someone else's body on mine. I was dead for so long, had to hold so still to look it, all of them around me, howling. I died for such a long time that I couldn't move even when he stood right over me, Archades. He looked down at me as I lay there, I still couldn't move, I lay there, being dead; and he smiled. He rode on, after the savages that killed my men. He smiled, and someone else's blood kept filling my throat that I couldn't even swallow it, cold and clotted and I'll never swallow anything again but that it's hot, that it burns on the way—'

Vossler fumbled at his flask, as though his fingers were numb, and he'd forgotten it was empty.

'You know,' I started to say, _that it wasn't Basch, then,_ but knew it for a lost battle before I began; Vossler's eyes, his ears were elsewhere, lost. 'You may have a point about moving now,' I said instead, dumbly. 'But I'm not going to risk it on the sake of a whim. I'll…go find out from Basch what exactly he's doing here, for perhaps our assumptions are only that, and his intent all innocence.'

'Don't let him know we intend to rob the train.' Vossler shuddered, hard, almost angrily. 'I don't want him thinking I've fallen so far.'

The thought that occurred to me I didn't voice either – _but if we are right, Basch is intending to do the same_ – because where Vossler lived, logic did not keep him company. I returned to our sleeper to recoup, to consider, to write my thoughts, for apart from challenging Basch outright as to his intentions, I couldn't think of a single way to get him to talk. Perhaps that is the way, then; directly so.


	8. Chapter 8

I have crumpled the pages of this notebook. Badly. I don't know why such irrationality had me scour every page so thoroughly, as though I could have seen where he read, where he left the mark of his eyes.

The circumstance that led to Basch obtaining my notebook began sedately enough. I tucked my notebook in my shirt and then tucked in my shirt as well, tightened my gun belt against Vossler's too-big pants, even combed my fingers through my hair that the tail looked less like a horse's and more like humanity; I checked the progress of my bruised eye in a fragment of mirror, and left the cabin.

Basch and Fran I found in their first-class cabin, she with a glass of wine and he with a steaming pot of tea. Basch answered my knock with a smile and a greeting – ‘Archades, well come! - we were wondering what you were up to today,' – and on entry, I noted two things that immediately told me their intent was not innocent, not that of a simple traveller. The first was the map unfurled on Basch's bed, for it was well-marked with red ink. The second was Fran, curled about a book with her ears proud and aloft, and her shoulders half-swallowed in a great armchair possibly larger and more comfortable than my bunk above Vossler.

She sat shoeless. I couldn't look away from her feet; not until she tucked them under her buttocks did I realise I had been staring. I flushed, even as Basch clapped me on the shoulder, genial, and steered me to a footstool, apologising for the lack of chairs.

'Rest assured this is more luxury than I've seen in the six years since I left home,' I said, as I sat, adjusting my gun belt, and then cursed my tongue on the instant, for it seemed I could not hold the damned thing in their company.

'Ah,' Basch grinned, sprawling across the bed, 'first class well deserves the reputation. We lamented missing the train at its due stop; we had to race with friends to catch up. Still, after a full-forward gallop nothing feels better than a firm mattress and a feather-down quilt.' He pushed the map towards the back of the bed and invitingly patted the space beside him, his palm resounding on what was a sprung mattress instead of a folded rug on slats; I blinked, and reminded myself that not everyone had Vossler's degenerate intent. 'More comfortable than a footstool, if you prefer.'

Regardless of preference, I stayed where I was, jarred. His statement successfully threw whatever half-baked strategy for questioning I had determined over the time it took to walk from our passenger compartment to first, for I decided to begin with questioning his impromptu and improbable arrival.

'I had wondered how you arrived when you did,' I admitted, helplessly.

'Shall we add 'adroit observation' to the list of things you are good at?' Fran asked, dryly; when I looked over at her on the armchair, she waggled four fingers at me. Her feet were still beneath her, the book forward across her knees.

'Tell me,' Basch said, 'what are you and Vossler truly up to on this trip? We're in town shortly, are you disembarking there, perhaps?'

At that I truly felt inadequate to the task I had set myself on Vossler's behalf, as though I had not spent years swindling my way out of trouble with a quick tongue and a smooth smile, because my only response was:

'I had wondered the same of you.'

'If we add 'wondering' to the list,' Fran said, and added a thumb to those four fingers, 'that makes five things you're good at, Archades. Or are you a wanderer instead?'

'A good one,' Basch amended. 'It takes a special kind of man to be good at wondering the world. Or wandering, for that matter.'

'Not,' I said, valiantly attempting to regain some control over the direction of this, 'if he happens to have a map,' and I rose to kneel on the bed, reaching over Basch to take the map he had so carelessly crumpled away.

His hand on my belt had me flinch, violently. I expected him to keep me from seeing that red-inked map, which would presumably outline his intent, for at the front of this notebook I had a similar map folded and marked so, with days, times, distances, caches; yet, of everything I expected him to do to stop me, grabbing the waistband of my pants was not one of them.

‘He’s quite delightful when he's nervous,' Fran said, mildly reproachful, but Basch made a sound that I hope I never have to hear again: half a growl, chilling and almost animal, a heavy exhalation at which Fran sat upright, all teasing forgotten, and said in a tone of voice alarmed and demanding: 'Basch-'

I looked down, and tentatively lifted my fingertips from the corner of the map, but that was not Basch's concern.

His eyes were fixed, to the gun hanging to the right of my hip.

Slowly, almost reverently, Basch drew my gun with his free hand, not releasing me, and checked to see if it was loaded, which it was. He closed the chamber again, one-handed yet deft. His hand was trembling; the weight of his other grip dragged at my trousers.

'I know this gun,' he said, his words slow and his voice suddenly gravel. 'The ivory. The engraving. I know this gun, from before-'

I freed myself with a complete lack of dignity, for Vossler's borrowed trousers near fell again as I tugged away. Basch rose to his feet, swift enough to make me flinch, for with a gun in his hands that motion looked a threat of violence.

'Basch,' Fran said, sharp, ‘He’s quite delightful enough merely nervous without you making him terrified.'

'Stop it,' Basch said, 'no more games, Fran, I know this gun and I know who this is. Tell her your name, Archades. Your real name.'

'He already has,' Fran said, and I saw her rise to her feet. Two limping, halting steps forward she took, wincing. 'It's Ffamran.'

Basch closed his eyes, pained, and lowered the gun. The motion did not ease me.

'Fran,' Basch said, 'allow me to introduce you to Ffamran Mid Bunansa, youngest son of Doctor Cidolfus Demen Bunansa, he who would be sole arbiter of all our fates.'

In the stillness that followed, I watched as Fran's ears swayed with the motion of the train. She was unsteady on her the balls of her feet, shoeless. I wondered at the sole that must lie within her boot to allow her to walk a normal pace, for whoever had run the chain through that space between heel and ankle - not my father, not, for on his estates he kept that operation surgically precise, and what remnant mark of that chain on Fran was butchery.

'Perhaps you should kill him, then,' Fran said, calmly.

Basch raised the gun. My gun. My father's gun, that I had taken it as a reminder of his effectual violence, a thing of beauty and precision and ivory, long-distance death, that I had taken specifically never to use; and strange Vossler thought me, to carry a gun to never use it, perhaps, but it was my father's gun. It gave me great satisfaction to keep it loaded, and keep it useless.

'We've all had a past we regret,' I said. 'Actions we wish undone. If you would kill me, do it for something I've done, like lusting for your wife or hustling, horse-thieving or hungering for, for that, whatever you choose. Don't you dare kill me for something that's none of my doing, for what say have I ever had at being born my father's son?'

'Your father would have us believe a man cannot deny his blood,' Fran said. 'That we are born to be what we are, I with the ears of an animal and thus to be treated one; you with your heart a Bunansa, to be black as one.'

'Would I even be here,' I said, I _pleaded_ , 'here, on the frontier, with the great green within arm's reach, would I be here, slumming with a washed-up drunk who beats me and _uses me_ , if I still considered myself his son? Basch, _please_. You know what it's like to despise your own flesh, your own blood, but however much I despise my blood I'd rather keep it inside, where it's not going to get messy, Basch. You ran away too, from your inheritance, the good the bad, all of it. All of us. We've all had to run away at some point and we know the shame of it, you and I and Vossler, a commonality, please-'

His breath tangled in his words. 'You're asking the wrong one of us for mercy,' he said, his eyes on mine. 'I'm hers, I'm all hers, her word moves my hand even in this—'

'Your choices are always your own,' she said, 'the pair of you, and as human and fallible as the rest of us.'

The skin at the corners of Basch's eyes wrinkled, heavily; such sorrow. He raised his free hand, to run a thumb over his scar. ‘He’s – quite delightful, when he's begging.'

She staggered two steps forward, reaching, but Basch was already lowering the gun. I judged that rather than continue to move so gracelessly, Fran stopped, folded her arms, and her expression smoothed, still, calm, frightfully so. 'Perhaps you should leave, Archades. It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance; I had wished to part under better circumstance-'

'Wait,' Basch said. 'Take off your shirt, Archades.'

He put the gun into his waistband and untucked his own shirt around it, hands to the lace at his throat, under his beard. I watched as he worked the lace free, opening the fabric; disbelieving. 'I must look completely stupid instead of delightful, but I know what it means when you say something like that and you're getting naked and pointing a gun–'

'I'm not pointing a gun now,' he said, tugging his shirt open over a chest furred like a blonde rug, flat with muscle, 'and I do apologise for that, but note that nor am I getting naked. I'm asking that you take off your shirt. And turn around.'

I realised Basch knew.

Against the pounding adrenaline of the last few minutes, I didn't know what burned more, the shame or the speechless betrayal in Fran's eyes; betrayal that sparked my own ire, for I truly could not be blamed for what my father's own research and writings had done to Fran, to her own involuntarily estranged blood-kin. I fumbled as I unbuttoned my shirt, forgetting the cuffs until I had already tried to pull it off, my breath too heavy and the air within the carriage cold on my skin. That the shirt was Vossler's, and too large, allowed me to pull tight cuffs past the width of my hands, and I flung the fabric to the floor. Basch smoothed his own doffed shirt against his chest, folded it, and placed it on the bed.

'Turn around,' he prompted again, and I spun, angrily and spitefully that I knew I looked a petulant child, to put my face against the wall.

'Oh, Archades,' Fran cried; her voice, the restraint of her anger, it broke on my back.

Of a sudden I was shaking, uncontrollably. No woman had seen me bare like this; no man but Vossler and that admittance a grudging one, bare inches of scarred skin slowly acclimatised to the feel of his eyes as each drunken grapple claimed more of me. Over the roar of blood I didn't hear Fran's stumbling approach, but when her fingers planted on my shoulders, so warm, I near fell to my knees, and clutched at the wall to stay upright.

I remember how level Basch's voice was, how sane that kept me. 'How did they get yours to such a state?'

-and my own responses, clinging to Basch's calm, came as dry as if we exchanged pleasantries, the time of day, a comment on the weather: 'A stock whip. One that I refused to wield. They pissed on it, then dragged it through fresh-spilled offal.'

'Intriguing method,' Basch said, and I heard the rasp as he scratched his chin through his beard. 'Mine they rubbed through excrement. The infection near killed me.'

'The offal,' I said, steadily, 'was taken as I watched from the guts of a girl I had made love to the night before.'

Fran whimpered, close enough that I could feel her breath on ragged skin. Her fingers moved on me, tracing lines, some over-sensate, some still numb even with the years passed.

'Your father?'

'Ultimately, yes. Not that he would ever lend his own hand to such a task.' Fran pressed closer, her lips on the knot of bone at my nape. And wet. Her face was wet; tears, touching me with her tears; it burned that I had made her cry. 'He had my brothers to do it instead. One with the knife, the other with the whip.'

'Soldiers,' Basch said, 'my own men did it, under the eye of the General. For treachery I never committed. And these are men are our leaders, our government, our morality, our compass against the wilds. No wonder we make no forward progress.'

'Sins of the state or the soul,' I said, 'they scar our vanity equally well, but nothing more than that.'

'Nothing more?' Basch asked, wry. 'From the way you startle at a simple touch, I think considerably more than just our vanity. You're like a horse badly broken, Archades; all that arrogance keeps you facing forward, yet the nerves won't let you stop running.'

I turned then, a retort on my lips – 'kindly don't make even the slightest allusion relating me to any form of mount, for I know where that path ends,' – but as I turned I saw, him, standing, still facing away from me and still shirtless, and his own scars silenced me.

I had never seen my own back. Vossler had said little on the matter and decidedly never questioned, and his only acknowledgement was that of his hand, along my spine as he bent me, always further than I thought I should need to be for him to claim his comfort. As I sighted Basch's back, I wondered how Vossler had kept his queries quiet, or if perhaps my back did not look quite so much like such an impossibly woven lattice, but then Fran said—

'Scar for scar, I think Archades trumps you, Basch.'

-and my stomach turned, that bile tightened my throat.

'He's the first who can claim that,' Basch said, agreeably, and bent to pick up his shirt.

At that point, Vossler chose to make things violently worse by rattling at the door, calling a drunken demand through. Basch stepped to open it and all I could think of was what this would look like, the pair of us shirtless and Fran standing close enough to me that I could have kissed her, and as, indeed, she had already done to me if only my back, and with her tears. Her cheeks were still shining and her eyes more-so; she gave me a firm smile despite that.

Thus spurred by tears, smile and the dubious wisdom found in the sudden fear that Vossler might, perhaps, hold true this time to the multitude of times he had vowed to kill me, I grabbed Fran by the upper arms, half lifted her against me as I took swift steps to pull us behind the half-screen arrayed for a dressing room; I bent my head that my height would not show, and whispered: 'Not a sound, or he'll-'

'I want it back,' Vossler said, strangely, as Basch opened the door.

Whatever Basch thought on turning around and finding the pair of us mysteriously disappeared, he recovered deftly enough. 'It? That's simply rudeness, Vossler. If you want Archades back so badly perhaps you had better go elsewhere to find him.'

'No, not him, it, I want, Basch.' Vossler must have hit something, or stumbled into it, a side-table perhaps, ill-tempered with words as ever. 'Why are you truly here, you and that savage, for you're…disturbing me.'

'I assure you, I was as surprised to find you alive as you were me. What happened to you? I heard the massacre took down your flank to a man. I _mourned_ for you, Vossler.'

Fran's hair, short as it was, brushed tantalisingly against my chin. With my bent neck and her own curled spine, her ears were right in my face, fine fur against my cheek, the tip of one in my eye. Her arms had wrapped around me when I lifted her; she did not move them now, and her grip was astoundingly warm, shirtsleeves rough on my scars. I moved my head, just slightly, to get her ear out of my eye; she let out a long, slow breath, and moved her head that her ears slid against my skin, suede on my cheekbones, the crop of her hair at my lips. My own arms were still around her, and shifted without conscious volition from a grip to a slide, around her shoulders, and lower, tighter, to an embrace that had my palms flat against her buttocks.

From there, she looked up at me with a sideways tilt of her head to avoid lifting her ears too high, and it seemed I had nothing to exist for except for kissing her, soundly; I did so.

I could hear Basch and Vossler talking – 'he reminds me of you, Basch, in that, always writing, scribbling' – moving, shifting, but their words made no sense. Something about the train, and complaints; Vossler was whinging again, Basch was being painstakingly hospitable. Something on idealism – 'I got used to the sound of it the years we travelled when we were young, pen scratching on paper; I like it when he writes' – that Basch laughed and Vossler made a disgruntled sound; he must have struck up a cigar, for I could smell it of a sudden. Fran opened her lips to my tongue, that I could feel her teeth, her own tongue, narrowed and deft, and the press of her body against mine could not all be attributed to her broken balance. Her breasts were firm against me; my hand found a way up under vest but missed the hem of her shirt, that my arm was caught between brocade and linen. Warmth filled my palm, her nipple stiff through fabric and binding both. I nearly moaned at the slide of warm fingers along my thighs, yet not until she touched me did I realise she had worked Vossler's treacherous pants down over my hips, to near strip me naked. There was nothing maternal about Fran's wine-rich kiss now, so responsive, nor what her hands started to do for me.

'—you're lying,' Vossler said, thickly, 'or joking. You must be.'

'Not at all,' Basch replied. 'In fact, if you'll accompany me to the bar I'll tell you more over a drink.'

'I'm not—' I could almost picture Vossler's grimace '—going to drink with you any more. Your explanations sound worse with whiskey.'

'Ah, well, tea then? Or do you have another preference?'

Something about the silence that fell chilled my spine. I grabbed Fran's wrists, but she still moved her fingers, distractingly well.

'That's Archades’ shirt,' Vossler said, in such a fragmented staccato voice that it made every hair on the back of my neck prickle.

'Oh,' Basch said, and I heard him move, stepping, 'this? I think you're mistaken. It's more of a size to be your shirt, Vossler.'

'You think I'm an idiot,' Vossler said, 'you and he both. That's his gun too, and he never lets that gun out of his sight. Where is he, Basch?'

'He's with Fran,' Basch said, so assuredly that all my desire died in Fran's hand, 'up on the roof.'

Fran put her lips to my collarbone, tracing a necklace of forgiveness along my skin; I heard Vossler slam the door as he left. I wanted to disengage, knowing what would come, but she was meltingly formed around me and I around her, and I think I never wanted to let her go. Daydreams, perhaps, waking daydreams. All I could do when Basch looked around the screen was meet his gaze, and I with my lips lust-bruised and his wife's hands working half-soft flesh; he was unreadable. How much did I want her, so, that it burned that only he stopped me from having her.

When he blinked, to break his gaze, I likewise snapped, away from Fran, abruptly, that her tortured balance broke and she near tumbled but for Basch's hasty catch; I used his delay to run, to snatch my shirt from the floor. I near fumbled it when I had to pull my trousers up and open the latch at the same time, but I ran with nothing more than a – 'Archades, wait—' left behind me, a shout from Basch's lips that he must have wished he had shot me when he had the chance.

I only realised my notebook had fallen from my shirt when I found myself a dark corner in the bar, a place crowded enough that there was some dubious, shaking sanity there, a tentative safety from retaliation; I drew out my pen no paper on which to write. I couldn't sit, not there, not still, and my thought then was of Vossler, out on the rooves somewhere looking for me: if Basch did decide to kill me, Vossler might be persuade to defend me, for I couldn't defend myself, not against a punishment that I deserved.

A considerable time later it was Basch, not Vossler, who found me sitting face into the wind, nose and cheeks numbed. He sat himself next to me, arms loosely around his knees, and followed my gaze. The great green line drew close to the train here, so close I could make out individual leaves dancing on the wind.

'Can almost see the smoke of the town,' Basch noted, and pointed as if I could have missed the only sign of civilisation on that forward horizon. 'We should arrive soon. Before midnight. Perhaps we'll have time to explore the town and find ourselves some music and a decent card game.'

I couldn't say anything. I admired him. I couldn't even think anything to the contrary, yet contrariness must have been beaten into me at some point, for I admired him, I wanted his good opinion if not more, and I desperately wanted his wife, and for a moment I mourned her latent lust, for without that, perhaps I could have been content just to dream.

'Here,' he said, and placed my notebook on the roof, my gun on the top that it wouldn't slide away. 'You left these. Come down when you're ready, we'll keep you a place at tea.'

I have to curl around the notebook to stop the wind rucking the pages. Not that it matters, I've crumpled them so badly regardless.


	9. Chapter 9

One problem of travelling with Vossler is that the desolate boorishness of his drunken state engendered in me a vast dislike for getting drunk myself, thus, when I did drink on rare occasions, my unfamiliarity with hard liquor in large quantities proves my downfall. Monstrously so.

This wash house is cold, and sitting in here naked makes it colder, but for some reason warmth makes me feel like retching again.

Each returning revelation of the night before can be hung on a corresponding hurt. The bruises across my upper arms, where he held me; the crack on the top of my head, where I seem to recall hitting a wall, abrasions, the scrapes across my knees, all from a fall. The mirror tells me that for some reason I have cut off my hair, but memory fails to append a 'why' as yet; yet memory seems all too intent on ensuring I cannot ignore the creaking pain of my hips, my knees, and that.

Revelations, an unfortunate amount of them, one atop of another. What I do remember with some clarity is that this all started with a revelation: of Basch's intent, or more rightly, Fran's. How that did distress Vossler so, to think his once-companion subject to the whim of a woman.

Vossler's expression always lightened in a saloon, where the piano played loud enough to deafen and eradicate all thought and corresponding brooding; perhaps he felt more at home, an anonymous mark amidst crowds of likeminded drunks, old soldiers carrying the weight of their years as well as their guts. Whatever the reason, he was almost amiable in saloons, one thing that had made our card ploy successful for as long as it had been. As it was, his current agreeableness set me at ease enough to accept a drink when Basch offered, and another when that went too quickly.

I had managed to avoid Basch, Fran and Vossler all, until the moment I saw them disembark for the night stop-over. I counted the soldiers as they ringed the government car, and could not avoid seeing that unlikely trio also. Basch and Fran walked near-apace, slow and steady, a perfect gentleman and his servant from this distance; Vossler trailed them alone, hunched against the wind. The aching idiocy inherent in the aggressive line of his shoulders had me slide from the top of the carriage and join them; he looked wretched walking alone.

As we sat, the four of us at a table more suited to two, they ordered tea. They ate, and I did not, for despite the near-smile on Vossler's face I could feel the tension, taste it, that my stomach turned; they knew everything, they had to, for Basch had read it all. In retrospect, attempting to settle my disquiet with the house brew, and later, whiskey, may not have been the wisest decision of my life; but indeed, when have I ever made a wise decision?

It was after they sated themselves that Vossler drew out his cards; I declined, as did Fran, and he dealt Basch a hand.

'Stakes?' asked Basch, and beneath that too-small table I felt his legs move as he crossed them. Fran shifted beside me, that I had to remind myself to look straight ahead and not stare at her profile, shadowed beneath her hat.

'Come clean,' Vossler said. 'I don't believe in coincidence. Tell me why you're on the train, for it's sure as hell not for the scenery.'

'Surely that depends on what you happen to be looking at,' Fran said. Basch's grin flickered, teeth flashing in candlelight; Vossler ignored her.

'Silliness.' Basch glanced at the fan of his cards before placing them flat again. 'I'll tell you now. We're going to rob the train.'

'I knew it,' Vossler said, almost triumphant. 'I can't let you do that.'

''Can't let?'' Basch said, amused, and Fran continued, cold that I cringed at the thought of what she had read of me, of him, 'What's your investment, Vossler, that you care – for it's surely not your innate morality protesting?'

Vossler huffed a laugh, half angry, still exultant. 'Listen to that. An animal attempts to tell me of morality. No, I'll tell you why I can't let you do that; because I staked that claim first. The money is mine, Basch. Although,' he added, as though he had the right to, as though he was not sitting there in a poorly-mended shirt and Basch opposing him in luxurious finery, 'if you don't get in my way, I'll see what I can do for you.'

'I fear you misunderstand,' Basch said.

'We do not intent to rob the train of its cargo,' Fran said. 'We intend to steal the train itself.'

Vossler stared at her over the edge of his incomprehension; I witnessed the moment when he understood, and his ignorance burgeoned into incredulity.

Despite myself, for I had half-vowed to not speak lest my words trip me again, I spurted, 'That's brilliant.'

'That's madness,' Vossler appended.

Basch and Fran were looking at me, he with a smile that showed more in his eyes than on his lips, she with the inverse, her lips curved, her eyes shadowed under the brim of her hat.

'No,' I said, 'no, it's brilliant, don't you see, Vossler? They'll take the train. It's a third of transportation and resources, the army will be a third crippled if they have to move to meet any form of attack, supplies will be down, drastically; the outlying territories will be vulnerable to reclamation. At the least, the natives will have their own form of rapid transportation for men and resources. At the worst, the General will get permission from the capital to destroy the train lines to prohibit their movement, crippling themselves and –'

'-destroying all your father's endeavour, and without a single violent move on our part,' Fran finished for me, and I saw it then, the flicker of a smile, brief. 'Your government's own fear will destroy themselves.'

'What do you mean, Archades’ father?' Vossler said, but Basch silenced him with a raised palm.

'What else, Archades? Tell me what other brilliance strikes you.'

'You'll steal more than the train. You'll steal away the heart of any endeavour.' I recall lifting my mug then, startled at its emptiness. 'There's the symbolism of it to consider. The media threads the train through all its tales of victory, of progress, of moving to the future; the train is the spine of our presence on this continent. We pretend the frontier is won for the trains keep running, depleted but steady, on time, an assurance that we have claimed the land, that territory is ours to keep; but the great green remains, untouched, defiant. The natives raid and kill at will, and the armies can't give chase into the forest. We have fewer and fewer men, and less women, and I can't recall the last time I saw a child, but as long as the trains run we pretend, we dream that we own our future.'

'That's stupid,' Vossler said, 'we won the war,' but this time it was Fran who silenced him, with a single sharp glance.

'Well done, Archades,' she said. 'Something else you're good at. Intuitive deduction. We'll run out of fingers for you soon.'

'A writer at heart,' Basch said, and sounded almost proud that I near ran then, 'to understand how a well-used metaphor can win the soul of a man or break his back.'

The next round of drinks had shots of whiskey beside the beer; I remember the burn as it went down and remembered Vossler's lust for it, unremittingly harsh.

'You can't steal a train, Basch,' Vossler said. 'There's only one track.'

'That you know of,' Fran said. 'We've built the beginnings of another one. It runs directly west, across the true spine of the world.'

Fran met our gazes, all three, one at a time. Basch smiled, Vossler looked numbed, and I could scarce assess what my own expression looked like, but I do remember her saying:

'He’s quite delightful when he's stunned-'

-that Basch laughed over the top of Vossler's scowl, raised his arm to call over an attendant, and said, 'Indeed, and I think he needs another drink.'

And so, I had another drink. A round of such, or perhaps more, for at this point I lost the thread of the conversation and recall only deep contemplation of the length of Fran's silver eyelashes, until Vossler's sourness disrupted me.

'You savages will never –'

'And that,' Fran intruded, 'is but one point where both you and Archades are wrong, Vossler. Basch and I are not doing this for those people that birthed me, for I am scarce one of them now than I am one of your kind.'

'Basch,' Vossler said, 'you're a lunatic. You're taking the train, and for what, for a whim? A mysterious track you claim to have built across the mountains –'

'Through,' Basch said, 'through. Took near three years, that part, so Fran tells me.'

'—and you'll cripple our country doing so; have you no conception of how wrong this daydream is?'

'No daydream,' Fran said, so quietly that I think only I heard.

'Not my country,' Basch said, 'not any more, and not yours from the look of you. And I wonder that you dare to reproach me with morality, Vossler, for that is a question a gentleman must ask himself, when he thinks the dark will hide it all.'

Vossler scattered cards across table and floor, violently, and his knees hit mine under the table as he said: 'Thankfully, I'm not a fucking gentleman, Basch.'

'That you are not,' Basch agreed, 'but you are fucking one. Are you aware of that?'

At that the trepidation surged again, queasiness riding on tension, that my throat tightened even as I tried to speak, over Vossler’s shocked silence, 'Please—' and choked, saying only, 'another drink, for this one's empty.'

Someone must have picked up the cards at some point, for I distinctly recall Vossler scattering them and yet, I also remember sitting in on a round, attempting to focus on the cards in my hand, trying to determine why it was so difficult to keep a count. It was easier when I didn't play the game, watching from a distance, from where I had no investment in the outcome but that of Vossler's satisfaction.

'—you can't have built a track that substantial,' Vossler insisted. 'All the way across the spine? I don't think so. You've only been dead for three years.'

'Again,' Basch said, 'you're correct, yet mistaken in a fundamental way. Why do you assume that I engineered this?'

'Who else—'

'None of this is my idea.'

At that Vossler scoffed, but I recalled what else Basch had said, previously, I blurted, 'Fran. Fran—'

'Yes,' she said, blithe, 'it's taken me years. Sixteen of them, to be precise, since I've been returned from the capital. Sixteen years of hunting for hearth and home. I will admit,' and her fingers slid along the back of Basch's, dusk against the gold hair of his wrist, 'that these past few years have been much easier than those others, for nothing is a greater solace than a like mind and a like soul for companionship.'

'You,' Vossler said. 'You. You. You savage, you woman, you treacherous flesh, I don't believe you. You couldn't have orchestrated something like that. You're trying to goad me.'

'Wait and see,' Basch suggested. 'When we take the train, you and Archades are free to take what gold you will, for we need resources, not currency. There's some logistics to finalise, the soldiers to disable, but it'll happen midway between the here and the next stop. That's where Fran's track crosses, that point at which the forest comes the closest to meeting the train.'

'Vossler's not patient enough to wait,' I said, 'not for anything,' and for some reason, found that hilarious enough to laugh, until my head started to spin, intolerably so.

I recall taking myself to the back alley relieve myself, and not realising how drunk I was until I stood up and found the effort of walking across the room almost impossible. No man should drink sitting down, for the posture deceives, suggests stability where there is none. I don't remember returning, but that Fran wondered where I had been gone for so long; I think I may have lost myself amidst the stars. Outside I felt almost sober, for the air was cool, and smelled like woodsmoke instead of cigars and liquor, those latter a smell like Vossler.

'—but we're not,' Basch was saying, 'helping the savages, as you call them.'

'You've always idealised them,' Vossler accused. 'Noble creatures-'

'The people that birthed me are just people,' Fran said. 'Wants and needs like any other, no more noble or savage than those who sit before me now. Some are good, some bad, some broken; I bear no allegiance to them for they cast me out as harshly as did your own people. I am tired of running, of searching for a home that exists only in memory and fantasy; thus, I stopped running, and started building.'

'So this is all for yourself?' Vossler sneered. 'You—' and he couldn't, even then, talk directly to her, 'your woman, your wife, your whore, she built a track all on her lonesome, dirtied her hands with it?'

'We am not alone,' Fran said; Basch leaned back in his chair as she leaned forward, and Vossler could not meet her eyes. 'In my years of searching I have found so many others that search, also. It is the frontier that draws them, for they don't know what they're looking for and think that this line will define them; a frontier pretends such proud definition for their lives; instead there is only ambiguity, potentiality, and a vile attempt at linearity that crushes all of that. My people, my people are not natives, nor savages, nor civilised men. They are those who cannot run from happenstance any longer; instead, they choose to break a new path. Face forward, not back, and if there is no track, well,' she shrugged, 'we shall build a new one, and Fate nor God shall not intervene.'

'I am here,' I said, and stopped.

'Yes,' Basch noted. 'You are at that. What brought you here, Archades?'

'I…came with Vossler.'

'But surely you had a choice,' Fran said, pressed so. 'What brought you here?'

'Gold,' Vossler said. 'Silver. Taxes taken from those who could scarce give it, and what do we care for blood or money but that it can serve us; fuck your ideals, for they'll not keep us in comfort.'

'No,' I said, 'that's not right. I was here…long before I met Vossler. I still couldn't find it.'

'Find what?'

'What I wanted.'

And oh, they pressed so, all three of them, questions with eyes and voices, even Vossler as he leaned back and snorted, 'you're fucking drunker than I've ever been, Archades,' and Basch, and Fran, that she turned with the heat of her body against my arm, the suggestion of curves; Basch leaned across the table, and his hand was heavy on my wrist. I thought to pull away, and could not.

'What do you want, Archades?' he asked, and even through the smoke, his eyes were so blue.

'I want,' I said, and nearly had to put my head down, on my arms, hiding, but that Basch's hand on my wrist pinned me as effectively as if he had crucified me for my guilt, that I wanted: 'I want. I want everything. All of it. I want the sky. I want the horizon, always. God help me, but I want, you,' and already Fran had pre-empted as I turned to direct that to her, taken my free hand in her own two, with her thumbs working on my palm that it felt like my spine was melting. 'And hell take me, but I want you as well,' I said to Basch, 'because if I'm going to want then I should want it all—'

'Wise,' he said, grinning, 'if you don't ask –'

'And I want you, yes, even you, you fat fucking son of a bitch,' and at that Vossler scowled, and then grinned fit to surprise himself, contorting it into a scowl again, 'because you're rude and inconsiderate and I don't have to be nice to you and it's nice not to be nice all the time, and I like the feel of your hair, and I want, especially, what you want: I want it back.'

Of them all, it was Vossler that understood; his confusion to translate what I could not explain.

'It's been years,' Vossler said, and his voice on that last, was wistful.

'Yes! Years, oh, Fran,' I didn't know if I wanted to weep or laugh, for Fran's hands were lost in my hair, fingertips on my scalp, and all Basch did was hold my wrist tighter when he should have broken my arm, 'I wasted so many years without knowing you, without having you; why did you let me waste all these years, Basch? Why couldn't I have met you back then, when it mattered, before all of this; why couldn't I have met you sooner?'

'He’s delightful when he's in love,' Fran whispered, just before she kissed me, and Basch's grip was nothing but affirmation.

I don't remember much of them walking me through the streets, but for the cold and the whirl of stars, spinning down towards sin. I fell, not quite on my face; Basch fumbled the catch as he gave Fran balance on his other arm, and Vossler laughed, the bruise on my knees another reminder.

'Do you ever shut up?' Basch asked, at some point, as I continued, even prone, 'I want you to be able to show your ears, Fran, and dress in dresses and grow your hair, I want a place where you can walk on your own—'

'I can walk on my own; though I would settle for you walking on your own,' she said, and the sound of Vossler laughing at her statement was almost a benediction, so I struggled to my knees, rose, reeling, that Vossler caught my elbow and steered me forward, and I said: 'Ah, Vossler, I think I'm so drunk I wouldn't mind if you did kill me.'

Basch had spared no expense with the room, broken memories of velvet and excesses of pillows supplemented by this morning's Frantic stumble out, across, to the washhouse, across carpet that sank under my feet, timber polished to a mirrored shine that showed my motion as I went, blurred.

'Oh God,' I said, as Fran undressed me with painstaking slowness, 'strike me, this is wrong, but I want the three of you.'

She guided my hand to the stays of her vest; I snapped them in my haste, threads ripping. I had no more words, then, for she shouldered into my grip, that my hand slid a natural path along the curve of her side, all the way up, to strip her. Her breasts were full, that I had to weigh them, one a palm, and the flesh cut and patterned with the stricture of her binding, a lattice like scars. I would have stayed like that, holding her, needing her, could have, but Basch planted his hand on my spine and pushed to tip me on top of his wife; the mattress sank beneath us, her legs wrapped around my waist, and one hand guided me inside as the other held my hips, a warm directive.

This I remember, from after: her taste a sour and mine a bitter and together all lust, for I knelt between her legs after her warmth and wet had claimed me the first time, just to look at where pale hair softened the twin-lipped edge. She was open, her thighs like silk along my shoulders; I met her eyes across the landscape of her belly, the valley between her breasts.

'Touch it, then, if you want more, more-'

My fingers followed that path inside once broached, still slick; her flesh quivered in response, flexing, that I touched that motion with my tongue to make her arch, tense and suddenly too tight around me, saying, 'there, and steadily, Archades—' that I did not stir even when a weight shifted the bed, and Basch's hand touched the back of my neck.

This I surely don't remember aright, but I must, for I distinctly remember the feel of lying with my head pillowed on Fran's soft belly, one hand on her breast; I distinctly remember the look of sweat sparkling caught in the hair on Basch's chest, I remember Basch looking at me, his eyes lazy with lust; that he smiled at Fran stirring under my hand; that he did to Vossler what Vossler did to me, until the latter cried out, shuddering, swearing, 'you bastard, you fucking, fucking bastard, near three years; don't look at her when you do this to me–'

This I remember, though the memory burns almost as much as the physical. I remember, for it may well be the only thing I said-

'I still want the both of you.'

Basch, stretching unashamedly near the window, his hair and beard left in a great frenzied mane, near groaned. 'I'm getting too old for this. It's near dawn.'

Vossler sat on the bed when he'd spurned it prior, for Fran's presence on it I had thought; the disturbance of his weight had me turn. His expression was unreadable as he said, quietly: 'Are you capable?'

At that I remember the pique or lust that took me, that I reached back without hesitation even as I kept my head on Fran's soft stomach, to thrust my fingers still sticky with Fran's twice-done spend well up myself. Too abruptly, for I had to close my eyes, though I did not stop. Vossler lunged to put his teeth on my neck, his breath hot; he ran his hand along the contortion of my shoulder, following the line of my arm as I moved. When I opened my eyes, he met my gaze with his eyes so hungry I near flinched, and he said, 'I fucking love this, you, when you're drunk.'

The feel of wet being poured where I had my hand startled me that I looked back, across my shoulders, to see Basch upending a flask over me. 'While I do remember the flexibility innate in youth, you'll need that to ease your way.'

Something in my bemused expression had him blink, then shake his head in rampant disbelief: 'Please, Vossler, please tell me that whatever other atrocities you committed on this willing body, you at least took this courtesy.'

'Travel scarce permits for such luxuries,' Vossler tried to protest, more defensive that I'd ever heard him, and Basch howled: 'Gun oil, man, surely you had gun oil—'

Whatever the slick was, it did make it easier, that the slide of my fingers, the four of them at Basch's encouragement, felt almost – good, that I arched back into my own hand and maybe made a noise, for Vossler ceased his commentary on the instant, his breath of a sudden heavier than mine.

I had nothing to do with the positioning, moving where Basch directed me, namely to Vossler's lap. There was no usual resistance; the sudden iron of him inside had me shout, and he raked his teeth across my neck, groaning. His arms chained mine, pulled them back to hold me against him, chest exposed, spine arched. I moved on him, couldn't help it with that, so deep, and awkward like this that I wanted to rise away from it. When Vossler fell backwards I could not resist; he drew me with him, that the scars on my back chafed, stark, against the sweat of his torso, his breath was hot and wet in my ear as he lifted his hips, to make me sound.

As I stared up at Basch, dazzled by the lantern-flame gold chased through his hair, he tugged the pair of us still interlocked across the rumpled bedspread, to the corner, where he could stand between our legs where Vossler spread me. His palms were rough on my scraped knees; I remember comparing the tan of his hands with the pallor of my shins.

This, also, I remember thinking: that when I said I wanted the both of them, perhaps I had not meant at the same time. I would forget this, that point when Basch set himself against where Vossler opened me already, when I ceased to think of anything but lust, and sweat, and urge; I would forget, but on this point mind and body conspire to betray that want, and indeed, it seems as though mind and body have been conspiring to put me in this position for much longer than this one night –

Oh, ever did I want, and who am I to deny that to myself?

The pain was less pain than sensation, for pain is nothing more than a glut of sensation. Sensation seen from so far on the other side that the mind tries to call it something else, to convince us that it is something different from pleasure, when it is not. The same touch can be a caress or a blow, all dependent on pressure, and it is not a clear line that divides the two but rather a bank of fog, nebulous, indistinct, ambiguous. What I felt was not pain, for all that Basch stroked the shudder of my thighs smooth, saying, 'hush, you'll wake the street, just give it a moment, stop trying to push down,' and that Vossler sucked on my earlobe, had his fingers across my mouth, ineffectually if he sought to silence me, and he whispered, 'your damned hair keeps getting in my eyes, stop thrashing about.'

It was Fran that took the voice from me, her lips on mine, and I, with Vossler holding me helpless to resist or hold her. Her tongue moved in my mouth, against my lips, a slow slide that I could only hold myself open to, for my attention was fragmented, shattered between them. Her hand slid along the length of my chest, past my navel, to grasp the root of my desire; at that point Basch started to thrust.

It proved, almost, too much, not that, not yet; but rather to find three sets of hands on me. Basch hitched up my legs, spread and pushed back that my hips ached, my knees; unnaturally so, that all the joints are still pained and loose now whatever his approbation for youth's inherent flexibility. Vossler held me unmoving with a grip like iron, an anchor where Basch would have forced me against the wall. Fran, and Fran, her lips like life, her fingers ordering my hair, stroking sanity across my shoulders, her other hand tasking me vigorously; she kept time with Basch, thrust and recoil both.

Too much, that I would have cried for them to stop but that when Basch drew back (and Fran up, and Vossler steady) it felt different – a teasing relief, a vagary of anticipation of his thrust forward – and when he did press forward (and Fran down, and Vossler unmoving), Fran had to follow as my head arched back to keep her tongue between my teeth. In small portions like that, once forward, once back, it was surely not too much for me to take; all sensation is pleasure, I told myself, even too much pleasure. I convinced myself of that, pleasure, as my rising shout confirmed, and that tangled breath relentless enough that Fran freed my lips, watching –

It was against the cupped pressure of Fran's palm, and came so unbearably scorching that Basch swore blacker than Vossler ever had and the latter moaned his wordless, concurrent fury in my ear.

I didn't close my eyes through it, though I ached to, as though if I were blinded it would not be me coming like this, with the pair of them splitting me, with Fran breaking me worse with the illegitimacy of her touch; another man, and another, and another man's wife. The sound that I made hung on the air, like smoke, for something fogged my vision.

Basch tossed his head to clear the hair from his eyes; I saw the flex of his muscular shoulders as he pushed still into the tension of my thighs, saw the grin break his beard, as he said, hoarsely, 'He’s quite delightful when he comes—'

But at that, all my convincing collapsed under their weight, all my want sated, and small moments of 'almost too much' became a sudden single impossible hurt, and I shouted for them to get off me, to get away. I leapt up when Basch stepped back, fighting free of Vossler's hold. The long minutes of compression betrayed me, for the unexpected pain in my hips and knees had me collapse on the carpet, shaking, and the world curled black at the edges, like parchment on flames, flames –

And now I remember how I earned the new crop of my hair, for as I bowed, disabled, it was Vossler that gathered it, hacked it off unevenly with his belt knife, to say: 'There, you see, don't you forget this, don't you dare go all self-righteous on the morrow, pretending that you hadn't liked it, pretending that you're better than I, that you have some high nobility at the core of you and I just a vehicle for your cursed atonement; you got exactly what you wanted, Ffamran,' and as I watched – as I had watched motionless when he drew the knife, when I wondered if he would gut me there, yet he had not – he threw the bundle of hair in the fireplace, and sounded bitter when he said: 'And it's not fair, but God knows you always get what you deserve.'

'You're acting a bastard, Vossler,' Basch observed. 'One day you'll tell me what happened to you after I left,' which did amaze me, for he still didn't realise what he had done to Vossler when he died.

What I do not remember is how long I knelt there, spotting the carpet, for when I looked up again Fran knelt opposite, lantern-light amidst the silver of her hair; I could smell fresh air instead of burning and sex, a cool breeze. A glance told me Basch stood by the window, Vossler in a chair on the opposite side of the room, full-clad despite our nudity; he stared at his flask propped on his knee, unmoving.

'Are you well?' Fran asked, and I could not raise my gaze above the level of her nipples, dark tips on dusky skin. One was bruised; had I done that?

'I am not well,' I said, 'for Vossler is right, and I am as much a bastard as he.'

Then Basch was there, kneeling at my side and she before me, his arm around my shoulders and her fingers cupping my chin. 'Vossler's not a bastard,' Basch whispered, 'he just acts it. No man's born a bastard, but for, well, a bastard-'

'I am my father's son and more a bastard for that, I think –'

'Keep telling us how worthless you are,' Vossler called, 'we might believe it.'

'This is wrong—'

'Only if you learn nothing from this,' Fran whispered, that Vossler could not hear. ' _Come with us, Ffamran._ '

'I want to—'

But, ah, what moral crisis caught me in the fork, for I could but think only that they were married, these two, and such vows would only be broken by lowness, by degradation, by twisting of a straight purpose; I had scarce realised I spoke, something, of the like, until Fran slapped me.

The shock of that drew to me some sense of myself, that I met her eyes.

'You think that a marriage means he owns me,' she said, 'that any vow of the same means, for a man, 'at last, I need make no effort any more, for I have won a wife—''

'A lie,' Basch said, mournfully, 'for I've never worked so damned hard—'

That Vossler laughed, angrily, gratifyingly—

'—but that I want to, yes, so much so, for she gives me such great satisfaction when she smiles, and I would make her smile all day and all night were I capable; all I can do is strive to be as best I can to keep her, at my side.'

'—and you think,' Fran continued, 'that I am incapable of want and choice myself, that I lust for you just because you have that between your legs and I want it between mine?'

'Yes,' I said, admitted, for what else was there that drove me but that, 'it seems, so, for why else would you flout the honour that is your husband?'

For a moment, I did think she would slap me again; Basch punched me in the arm hard enough to sway me, in her stead; another bruise. Another remembrance at that:

'When we met, Basch thought to put me on a stand,' Fran said, 'thought of only the nobility of my people's plight and how that did make me greater than myself. I ask you, what being could stand to such expectation? And then your father, yes, who has turned the path of my life though we've never met; he who would make me into an animal, thoughtless and wantless, choiceless; what am I to be if I would let these men make me, a goddess or a long-eared goat? Woman, wife or whore, they are all words that deny my own want, and I want, you, for who you are and not because of what I am. What do you want to call me, Ffamran, what chain of words will you insult me with, that you think my lust the drive of a thoughtless beast, that my lust breaks vows because it is my nature, and cannot be helped—'

'Fran,' I said, 'oh, Fran—'

'Am I not also allowed to want the both of you,' she asked, and her hands coiled in her hair, about the root of her ears, 'for the fact that you both strive to better yourselves, to progress, and in that striving I do see worth? A person may be sufficient in themselves, but what person is ever content, alone?'

'Say it,' I said, 'that I know it is not lust and insanity, that the words make it a thought as well as a want,' and she smiled, to say:

'I still want the both of you.'

'But,' Basch said, 'please, not now, for I am older than the both of you and God knows I need my sleep, lest you be bitterly disappointed in me, for all your fine words as to my vaunted and, as I must protest, purely rumored prowess.'

But of after that, I only remember the incongruity of it, the nakedness of us, flesh of three different shades; how I hurt at their proximity, at Vossler's distance, for he was not there when I woke with bile in my throat and savagery in my skull.

Dawn begins to warm the washhouse; I hear the clatter as someone stokes the boiler outside, and I worry for a moment that perhaps I've forgotten to lock the door, but no – it's secure.

I do not have the time to consider the answers that this night brought. I do not have time to consider who will be forsaken. I scarce have time to wash, for the train's leaving within the half-hour.


	10. Chapter 10

'-again,' Vossler had said, 'you think me nothing but your personal demon, that you exalt yourself by comparison.'

His words plague me with a trepidation that weights like a chain, that I consider them now where I keep watch on the change of the guard; circuits of four by four in motion between shifts, their watch on the engine room, for even a native attack would target that as the train's heart, and that on the carriage that holds the gold and silver of tight taxes and tithes. There are altogether too many of the soldiers, at least sixteen in motion at any one time, on the cars between engine and hoard, passing by. I count just for the sake of thoroughness, for I've done this before, I know their patterns. I'll have to sling myself under in the dark, to set fuses by feel instead of sight. The task is not daunting; what I contemplate is where I will set the charge, for there are two outcomes here.

The conversation with Vossler was one-sided. His fingers stretched my jaw as he closed his other hand in my hair, only fingers though that I had knelt, that I'd offered; I found myself wondering if he truly didn't trust me, still, that he thought as he had once done, that I would bite him.

'We should stop them,' he said, distantly, fingertips rough along my tongue. He tasted of cigar smoke, of salt. 'Stop their great damned idiotic train robbery. It's a game to them, they don't know what they're going to do to the men out here. The people. Basch must be spelled by that woman, by the green word that keeps their forest intact if not just spelled by her cunt. To think she's caught you with that trap too.'

When I tried to pull away, to speak, his hand followed me to keep my silence, fingers deep between the rows of my teeth. At that I did bite, just enough to get him to pull back, that I could say; 'All they want to do is find a new home, even if by such a sweeping method. Yours is a selfish reason to wish their cause ill. It's a new start, Vossler, that's all it is.'

It was then that Vossler said: 'You think me nothing but your personal demon, that you exalt yourself by comparison. Your own want for their insanity is nothing but your own selfishness.'

'Whatever you think of me,' I said, bemused, 'I don't care any more. You can stop them. I'm not going to. They've already said you can take the gold, they don't care for it. All they want is the train, transport and transformation in one.'

Vossler blinked at me, with an expression that had my breath catch in my throat, and I flinched away before I realised that he was smiling, to look a man I had never seen before. Who he used to be, perhaps; the Vossler Basch knew. For a moment, I found myself regretting, something, I couldn't determine until he said:

'You're already gone, aren't you?'

I rose away from him, and the sway of the train around a long curve aided there, inertia that I could step back and stand in one motion. I gathered my shirt from the floor, to dress. Vossler stood, reached, to run both hands through my hair, and I will admit I braced myself, expecting him to close his fists to pull the short crop: all he did was let his palms rest against the back of my neck. It says the worst of me, that I ever and always will expect the worst of him.

'I cut this,' he said. 'Remember?'

'Of course-'

'-remember saying that you wouldn't leave; I remember you said you wanted me. Wanted, me. I thought you a man to stand by your word.'

'And I say, I was so appallingly drunk I could barely stand, much less by my word.'

'But _they_ say, don't they, that wine speaks the truth.'

'A shame then,' I said, 'for I was drinking whiskey, not wine.'

Now that I write, I realise what struck me as so incongruous of that whole fragmented conversation we had; that between us from start to finish, the only whiskey present was the word from my lip.

Whatever the motivation behind Vossler's desire to stop Fran, to stop their great theft, be it spite, hate, fear; neither she nor Basch had any desire to stop his intent to do what he willed. I think, if the right words would come, Vossler would understand the core of what they want. He could change; maybe he would come. Surely there's some adventurous spirit left in him.

But as I write that, I look up; he has found me already, and also found his spirits. He lifts the flask to his lips as he sways, more than the train's motion necessitates.


	11. Chapter 11

The worst of this latest batch of abrasions is that each one proves Basch right, and worse, proves myself right: that I do only ever get precisely what I deserve. Changing someone else's mind is an impossibility, brutal and ridiculous to attempt such, when I can scarcely set my own mind to a single refined intention.

'He'll drink himself to death if we leave him,' I said, and what smarts as badly as the rope-burn is how easily did I transfer that 'we'. 'We three', instead of 'us two', now. 'We need to do something.'

'We are doing something,' Fran said. 'We're stealing the train and moving ahead. Nothing stops him from following; nothing stops him from staying, as he wills it.'

'Ffamran,' Basch said. 'So recently you've decided to assume responsibility for your own fate; is it not too soon to assume responsibility for another?'

'Perhaps you should be an accountant,' Fran said, 'and account for yourself first, Archades; not for another.'

'You take control,' I said, bitterly. 'You lead me on, until I have no sense of my true intentions any more. You have no need for me; he needs me—'

'Animals need,' Fran said. 'Only animals, and we are not animals however another would strive to turn us into such. Food, shelter, water, the other; needs, that must be met. Only we can want, can choose what they want, who they want, where they want to go, live, be. Want is our privilege to have; do not bandy 'need' at me and think my balance dependent on your presence. You're insulted I have no need for you? I am disappointed that you think I should need you; am I not sufficient on my own?'

'We want you with us, for you're pleasant company,' Basch said, amicable for all Fran's sharpness; he stroked his beard smooth.

'Delightful, even,' Fran appended, 'and if you would go to him, if you want our presence there, we will come, but consider also his right as a man to choose his fate.'

I should have listened, should have, for Basch surely knew more of Vossler than I ever had, knew the soul of him when I had only ever seen the flesh. I should have listened, for Fran surely knew more of fate, and circumstance, of want and need. Did I want them with me, yes, did I need, yes, the three of them, the man I wanted to be, a woman I wanted to have, and he, who was everything I would never let myself _become_.

'You can't stop this,' I told Vossler, before he gagged me, 'there's no way you can stop this, I've already laid the charge. And even if you can stop this, if you kill them, Basch and Fran, even if you kill me, there's others, in the wood. Lots of them, and they're not going to let one man steal their liberty.'

I glared as best I could after he bound my mouth, but he refused to meet my eyes, busying himself with the rope at my wrists. It took him longer that it should have, for his fingers were thick with intoxication, and paused to linger too frequently, stroking, that I shuddered.

'If I fuck you now,' he said as he wound rope, inexpertly for that it took mere moments to twist free after, 'will it change your mind again? Is that what did it, bedding them, it changed your mind and made you want, more? If you want more I can give it you, God help me, with the money from here I could even buy you your own girl to use—'

But I kicked, that Vossler had to busy himself with tying my ankles together before he slammed the cupboard door, latching it firmly. He missed the point, the wrongness of even suggesting such to me, to _me_. His vision must be so blurred, through boozing, through whatever nightmares kept him from sleep, it couldn't have just been the war, losing it, winning it, whatever; it couldn't just have been the supposed betrayal that had him fall so far. Fear kept him there, fear, and of what? Loss, when he only had more to gain? Even if he had loved Basch, however strange a thought that seems, Basch was still _here_ –

I cannot pause to tend where I have flayed my wrists twisting free. I must untie my ankles and get out of this cupboard, quickly, for the raid is imminent.


	12. Chapter 12

It has been some time since I wrote, yet each day has quickened, speeding to get us where we're going; strangeness, that, for none of us truly know where that is, only that we go.

On occasion we do have to fight, and I also, though that surprises me; my hand is best when turned to repair what sabotage takes great segments of track. Those circumstance which slowed us grow less the deeper we progress, for those natives who live this deep are not scarred by past experience. Knowing what will come after us, I wonder if we should treat with them far harsher than we do, as if to prepare them; but such thought passed more quickly than did we. It is a foolish thought, for the like harshness committed on my own back had done little to prepare me for any of Fate's vagaries, nor God's providence.

In the beginning it went too smoothly, though that should not have surprised me for with three minds planning it, examining from all angles, problems were well avoided to begin with. Basch proved to have had near the same thought as Vossler and I, that we had a great surplus of explosives once all necessary had been set; nevertheless, Basch had deferred willingly to my youth when it came to the midnight tasking to lay the charges.

It began with a flare that Fran fired into the sky; even though I was expecting it I still startled when a veritable force of men and women emerged from the tree line, riding fleet across the stretch of broken grass to circle, parallel, to where the train ran still sleeping under the silver eye of the sky. The explosions fragmented the train into three, striking at only the connections between them. My timed count dispersed the soldiers into those three manageable groups, three separate cars, for it caught them between changing shifts. The fragmentation looked to run awry, for released, friction and perversity proved to give each segment its own speed, but before that chaos could spark destruction, I watched as clockwork coordination and the most well-trained horseflesh I'd ever seen conspired to catch, slow, further separate each car with men at each individual brake. _Too long training to achieve such_ , Basch griped as I expressed admiration, more as an ex-Captain than himself there to reject praise. However long it had taken, it proved worthwhile, for death had never been the aim here but theft. The destruction of the train would render it worthless.

The scene was cast in silver and gold alike, for the moon overhead and the lick of slow flame. Passengers spilled from the latter cars where they had been halted first, so distant from where we three stood aside, watching; the forward cars still in gradual, slowing motion.

When the engine room exploded, right at the far end of the shattered chain, I ran, thoughtless.

There are some things that a man knows, without knowing; I knew, that I ran fit to tear my own throat out, that I ran, and never had I been so eloquent as when I ran then, for I swore I'd kill him, over and over. Basch kept pace at my heels, not that I saw, only heard his heavy tread; I thought nothing of Fran's inability to keep pace, for this, at least, was not her burden, her battle. Basch shouted something, a sergeant's command, for some of his men – though I should not call them that, for he does not lead them – pulled alongside us as they rode. I remember mounting between strides, swinging up behind a stranger; shoving him off and taking the reins so smoothly it happened without consideration, and if I had considered I probably would have faltered at the improbability of such a move. I heard Basch curse my rudeness as he stopped to mount another horse with somewhat more gentility to the original rider, now far behind me as I rode.

Whatever my rudeness, it had me at the engine's wreckage long before Basch.

He was there, as I knew he would be, that ever-present cigar clenched between his teeth and the last of the coiled explosives about his shoulder – and I knew I should have discarded them all, those provisionals – and I shouted – 'Vossler, you _arse_ , what did I ever do to you to deserve this-'

Vossler sucked hard on the cigar that the ember at the end glowed fit to rival the riotous flame that raged at his back; he took it from his mouth, and he went to set it to the end of the chain of dynamite about his neck.

He would have. Ah, God, he truly would have, but that I shot him first.

I still don't recall drawing my father's gun. I do recall dropping it, as though it burned with its sudden unfamiliarity.

-and he rocked back, a single step that seemed across a chasm. Basch caught up then, leapt from his horse to run past my numbness; he ripped that coil of explosives from Vossler's side and flung them with a great, spinning heave, well away from the flying sparks that turned his now-loose hair such an unbearable bloody gold, as red as the blood that flecked the side of Vossler's face. Only sparse drops, that spatter from the shot, to glisten wetly on his cheek; he wiped it with one hand, and stared at the wet on his fingers.

'Did you see that?' he asked Basch over the roar of the conflagration, even his shout hazed, by the drink as much as the heat. As he held out his hands he sounded so proud it broke my heart. 'What a shot. He barely nicked my finger. I'm still going to kill him.'

Basch did what I could not, and knocked Vossler out cold with a single double-fisted blow.

'I never,' I said, as we rode some distance away, Vossler slung face down across Basch's knees, 'I never thought I could, I've not. I've never shot at anyone before.'

'You picked a good time to start,' Basch said, and he spat, not on Vossler, though rage warred with despair on his brow. 'You could've aimed better; like at his damned heart.' And then Basch wept.

As we watched, helpless against the heat, the rest of Basch's people caught up to the now-twisted metal of the engine. No, I shouldn't call them that for they're not his people, nor Fran's people; I shall call these frontiersmen for they are, true ones, ever seeking the edges instead of the centres. They all had shovels, which mystified me then but I later discovered were there for the construction of that last segment of track that waited to be laid, from the trees to the existing line. I took one, and Basch another, and shirtless under the stars we all set to with a will, shovelling that barren dirt which so spurned our presence, until all heat was taken from the metal that we could salvage what we would; iron cooled singingly in the air, scorched and stinking.

Dawn streaked the horizon by the time we finished. Basch left Vossler still unconscious and yet unchained, by those soldiers who were chained, and we rode to inspect the damage; my hands were blistered, not so deft on the reins of the borrowed horse that I used my knees instead.

We found Fran there already, picking her way across the streaked metal deck. Somewhere during the night she had changed from her youth's garb to something looser, cut differently, that I could trace the shape of her breasts, the curve of her legs; most notably, her ears were uncovered, high, if streaked with dark residue across that silver. She smiled up at us, appreciative; it was then I realised we had not recovered our shirts.

Perhaps it should have disconcerted me, baring my sick scars to so many when it had near broken me just to bare them to Fran. All of these folk, men and women, youths and children, all were strangers to me, but when Basch himself walked without shame for what was writ upon his back, how could I do any less? Oh, some stared, and I felt their eyes, but it was either run or bear it, and so, I made my choice.

'Not so bad,' she said, and pointed at the mangled iron, still plinking, almost melodic, 'the shock of the blast caused impact damaged, and the heat melted lesser components, but the heavier metal withstood—'

'You'll not be able to use it like that even if the components look as though they've held their shape,' I told her. 'The heat distorts the metal too much even if the eye can't see, there's hairline stresses through it, where it will fail you later. We'll need to rebuild this. Set me up a forge.'

'Are you a blacksmith, to know the temper of iron?' Fran asked, with that dryness that I later learned was how she covered her uncertainty in front of others; for indeed, others had clustered about the ruin to stare within, watching the three of us. I rolled my shoulders, feeling the chill now along with their eyes, and said:

'Not a blacksmith. But I am my father's son, in this.'

Basch kicked the wall with thwarted glee, that the iron shell resonated about us, and said, 'A man could risk a lot should he forget you're more than a pretty face.'

I scarce heard him, for Fran was kissing me, hands across the serration of my shoulders, and I stroked the silver line of her ears, to make her shiver and nip at my own.

Later we rode out to where the frontiersmen kept the soldiers seated, bound together, the train's passengers bewildered, clustered close as though the familiarity of their uniforms ensured sanity. Activity was ceaseless; stores sorted, shifted, the other cars repaired of their minor damages, and gutted to serve as more efficient transportation, that this small core of bewilderment was the only stillness across the entire scape. Fran stayed mounted, one leg crossed across the spine of the horse; when Basch dismounted I did also.

'People,' he began, and I wondered that he used that term. I counted in their eyes some kind of despair close to savagery, a terror that they saw those native-born working amongst us; heathens, savages, animals walking beside men, women walking beside youths. Nevertheless, even a weak winter sun painted Basch in shades of pure gold, the warmth of his skin, the bronze beard and pale hair all; they turned to him as though he could give them salvation, and oh, how I wish they truly believed that, for he could have, if they had learned to listen.

'People, you will know me. My name is Basch fon Ronsenburg, supposedly a traitor to your people and executed; yet here I stand, and I beg you consider, where one of those is a lie, contemplate the truth of the other. We intend you no harm; no massacre, no vengeance will carve the ground here, only the new tracks for a train to follow. We have halted your progress to begin ours, out there,' and he pointed, west, that everyone turned to look, 'to find new land, away from this barren one.'

'The savages will kill you,' said one of the soldiers, with a look in his eyes as though he recognised Basch; disbelief, shock, wonder all. 'Or the magic of the great green; that cannot be penetrated.'

'There is no magic,' Fran said, from the back of the horse, her voice silk and silver, 'only lies spun of your own lords, of your own fear.'

'Of course the savage says that,' the soldier rebutted, 'she'll talk to them in their gibberish and she'll be safe while they kill all the others—'

'Before you commit treason,' Basch interrupted, 'allow me to introduce you to my wife, where she sits on her horse, above you, as is befitting for a member of the blood royal House of Solidor—'

-and at that, as they murmured, I did have to look at Fran; she grinned at my startled expression, '-adoptive, though—'

'And did you adapt to what they would have you adopt?' I asked, smartly; she rubbed the heel of her boot and replied:

'My shame is that I tried so hard that I did, indeed, and I tell you, it hurts to fall from that high a horse, whether Fate's hand demands it or merely chance.'

'—and at my side,' Basch turned, and I started again, for he clapped his hand on my shoulder hard enough that I had to brace not to flinch, 'stands Ffamran Mid Bunansa, youngest son of the inestimable Cidolphus Bunansa, he whose will and providence both have provided us with this train and continent to claim, and likewise the son will open for us the way to the west-'

-and what struck me then was the way they looked at me, with more recognition than they'd gazed at either Fran or Basch; it was then, only then that I understood the impact my father had on the lives of these people, to make it all possible and grindingly impossible at once, and I vowed, silent, that if I could, I would amend that impossibility –

'—why we are here is simple. We are robbing you of one of your great trains, and cutting a new path, out to the west. We are leaving, as soon as we are able. I speak to you with one purpose only: the sooner we are able, the sooner we will leave. The sooner we leave, the sooner we let you go. To that end, I offer you all a fair wage for your service, tax money unfairly taken from you and given back in return for your time, that we may leave here, so you may leave here too.'

The response, obviously, was mixed, from the spat curses of the bound soldiers, the stir of the menfolk, for 'fair' and 'wage' did not often hold hands, but it was the women who drew my eye with their stillness. Not the few wives present, seated eyes downturned at their menfolk's side, but the unattached ones, those girls who were drab-clad and unobtrusive, who strove only to be overlooked lest they be taken.

My gaze did disturb them, that one of them, flushing, said: 'Lord, lords and lady all, if we work, if we wish to work, if we will work, may we accompany you?'

-that surprised me, then, for all that Fran made a sound, a gratified hum. The youngest of the lot was not looking at me, but away, across the grass; I followed her gaze and understood on that instant, for she stared at where the women of the frontier worked apace with the men, numbers near matched. A choice, there; no small wonder that those girls saw a better one in our company than back along this barren track.

'You may,' Fran said, 'if you truly want. It will not be easy.'

Basch settled those who would work with their wages, promised from the hoard that I had once thought would be mine and Vossler's; as I listened to him state quantities, more than fair, in gold and silver, and I wondered that I had ever thought such crass metal worthy of attention.

I found Vossler standing at the car that carried the gold, a frontiersman standing watch; the youth nodded at me, with a warmth that still startled, and pointedly ignored Vossler.

'They won't let me leave,' Vossler said, as I approached. 'So much for Basch's vaunted word, that I can do what I want.'

'They will let you leave,' I replied, 'but not yet. They're keeping everyone here just in case word gets out. Only a few days of surety before the train's arrival is missed, but nevertheless, an important few days.' I nodded at the car, though Vossler refused to look at me. 'If you want to count out as much as you can carry, I'll ask them to let you in.'

Vossler scowled, and rubbed his palm against the finger my bullet had nicked, a dark abrasion across his skin. 'You have no conception of what I want.'

'It's not gold, I don't think. Not the metal, in any case.'

'Whiskey,' he said, 'they've kept me dry all day. I'm sure not all of it went up in smoke.'

I chose to ignore that, for I did not know how to meet the unspoken question.

'To think,' Vossler said, 'I thought I could stop this.'

'Why did you even want to stop it, Vossler? Even if you'd just walked away—'

'You have no conception,' he said, 'of what it's like to see someone you, you _want_ , get everything he deserves, and be left with _nothing_ but the want; surely I'm cursed, to suffer that twice over.'

At that I reached out, to try to touch him, that he flinched away and recovered his innate eloquence:

'Fuck—you, _away_.'

I planted my hand on his shoulder, firmly, and turned him away from the car. 'You may have heard I'm re-forging the engine of our journey west. Tell me, Vossler, are you any good with half a bar in your hands?'

I don't know what prompted me there, Fate or otherness, but it served well enough for those days we rebuilt, for Vossler and a forge went together like husband and, well. His temper more than matched that of crude iron, black on the re-forging. He assumed that task with such dedication that I wondered if he thought it his atonement, to re-forge what he had destroyed.

To my sorrow, I learned that where I read him as content, I read a lie. We could not avoid each other through the day, for I found myself unable to resist the temptation to order, him and others both; the first time he obeyed, silent, for all that it was common sense what I dictated, I declaimed loudly and at length my surprise that the sun still rose in the east that the other men laboring laughed, and Vossler darkened to match the metal he worked. At night I found the realization he avoided me even on those few occasions I had the time or energy to spend, with he, or with Basch and Fran.

He spoke more to Basch, out walking where no one else could hear, dark head bent to almost touch that crown of gold; Basch always returned from those conversations with eyes as distant as the horizon and a silence that smelled of cold. My attempts to get Vossler on his own only met with his ire as raging hot as it always had been for all his newfound level of sobriety, that I earned myself new bruises over which he demanded:   
'-do you wake in the morning with the thought to inspire someone to kill you, or is your conceit purely accidental?'

Still, Vossler's departure, lost amongst those of the old train's released passengers, surprised me. The tracks met; the engine was lifted via a framework of pulleys, horses and men the muscle; the train re-linked, connected, that I put my back to assist with the loading; when I sought to find him, he proved to be a day gone, and Basch did not take kindly to my imprecations that he and Fran had conspired to hide Vossler's departure.

I caught up to him by the time dawn caught me, for his callous indifference never drew the best from his mounts; for some reason I recall the feel of warm sun across my shoulders as almost a benediction. I realize now that it was the sight of Vossler's small camp that engendered that false optimism, the narrow line of fragmented smoke that painted the sky, stuttering as it died at my approach. His bulk was tight-wrapped and curled against age and cold both; a sight that weighed on me with near three years of familiarity for all the constant changing backdrop.

The iron curl of his hair was all that protruded from the blanket. As the opportunity presented itself, I kicked him awake.

I had not expected his viscous curses to enrage me so, that I kicked him again, again to set him groaning, that I realized I shouted, at him, at the sky: 

'Go on, you bastard, get up and walk away again, show me your back, so I can celebrate the fact you're gone all over again.'

Vossler chained his arm through my ankles without preamble, pulled that I tumbled, to press me to the dirt. His breath was hard and sour against my cheek, but not so sour as his expression, for whatever remnant of the night was on his lips, I could scent neither smoke or spirits.

'You can't let it alone,' he hissed, 'when you should; I really should kill you. Why did you have to follow me, why? You've got everything you wanted – everything –'

I fought then, 'I follow precisely because I hate you so –'

'Then why don't you go do something you like for once? Damn it, man, damn it, _Ffamran_ , you'd have a worthwhile life if you just did things you liked, go back to them, do what you like –'

-but I fought, not to cry, too well for once, that my elbow got him in the throat and had him sit back, up; freed of the weight of him I lunged, caught his hair, used my height as leverage to tip him back. I had my forearm across his throat, one knee between his, and only when I felt the hard heat of him did I realize what I intended. What he intended.

'Go on, then,' he said, strained, 'do it. You think it'll change my mind, the way that woman changed yours, fucking, fucking, as though it's anything but an animal urge as primitive as her damned fur, as her animal ears, God—'

It should have recalled me, that, reminded me that this was bestiality without ambiguity, what I would commit, but instead the rage blinded me, that I near ripped Vossler's skin when I ripped him free of his trousers. 'God you'd like it, you'd like it too—'

'Fuck me,' he said, 'as though it will eradicate everything I ever had with Basch, burn away all that loss with fill in its place, and it might even work if you fuck me hard enough; but it's not going to change my mind, Ffamran, I'm not coming back with you, to ride on their damned _aspiration_.'

There is one thing my father said to me that lasted, lingered:

'We are God's children, Ffamran. Fate would have us live a life exactly that of an animal's, without the ability, the knowledge, even the will to steer our path forward into the future. It is man's ability to speak to God that gives us our agency, that we may turn all tides of fate to achieve our aspiration, and across time it is our children that prove the vehicle of change—'

I cannot recall what my father else said to me, after my middle brother had exposed my midnight excursion, but his disappointment seared me dry of any tears. He didn't even let me into his study; he had them forbid me entry even to the house, and hold me outside, his slaves with their eyes downcast and their ears clipped and tattooed, and they stripped me. I fought hard enough to knock out three, and break the arm of one, for with their gait hobbled by the clip he ran through the flesh between heel and ankle they held no defense against my free movement. It was numbers that brought me down, to my knees, at his word. Bucket after bucket of water, until I half drowned in it, with his quizzical gaze to greet me after each dousing, until even I wondered what filth he could see left on my skin that he thought enough water could wash it away.

My father never wasted cruelty on his slaves beyond that of necessity, for they were animals, and as his deft, skillful training of horse and dog and native all proved, cruelty on animals served no purpose. No, he saved his cruelty for people, for people responded, as he said, to the fear of such; for a man could think, imagine, horrors worse than any that could be inflicted, that I spat bile into the mud at my knees when he said, still calm, still quizzical, _as well as bed with a dog, or a horse: would you like that corruption on top of your shame also?_

He offered me a choice, that knife or that flail; that I give her the quiet death of an animal, painless, swift, and across the throat, or that I give her the punishment of a slut, the whip in my hand to flay the skin from her back, and the only preamble, this; that it was my choice, for she had none. And God, but she knelt, and crept forward to kiss his boots, and he permitted it, smiled; he even caressed her ears with vague fondness, yet to me he asked, with a curl of disgust: 'What else have you been doing with them, boy? Animals don't kiss-' that I shouted through spit, _nor speak_ , and wept until I choked, _nor love_ , and begged, _nor hope, or dream, or aspire_ \- and that I learned, when I took that whip to blood her and could not, could not, that she died for it; _nor did they defend_.

But that was a lie learned so harshly it near became a truth, for any animal held like this would fight.

Whatever my thoughts wrote on my face, Vossler did not see, for his eyes were closed and his lashes barbed to dark stars with salt and wet, and he was not fighting. All he knew of was my hesitation was that it was there.

'Do it,' he said, 'fuck me filthy, get your vengeance, and then leave. Go back to the woman. You and Basch both, wanting that woman, and I can't understand it; what is it? The wet of her cunt, the slide; soft flesh, what, why, why I am fated to this, condemned to ever watch the things I want leave, for a thing I can't understand?'

'However you strive,' I said, as I rose, 'you will not make me into something that I would hate.'

We are a fortnight into this new trek, surrounded by seas of green, of leaves, a throbbing heart of wilderness so different to that barren ground from which we came that it should hold all my attention. The frontiersmen move through the train, around it, filtering the great green for food and fuel; horses ranging, children running amok. Fran is deft amongst them, her balance poised, graceful, and she is busy; Basch is company at night more for conversation than the other, that he protests he grows too old for more than casual dalliance; for that dalliance there is a boy, almost as bright as I seem to remember being that he now knows as much of this beast's iron heart than I do. That one startles me with his willingness to bend, where I had thought to find sarcasm, or sullenness, or even shame.

This notebook is near out of pages. I doubt I will find another amidst the train's supplies.


	13. Chapter 13

You've left your book behind again, you run about so mercurial. I begin to wonder if you do it deliberately, eh?

There are so few pages left I find myself wanting to fill them. I have not put ink to paper since Fran freed me from my imprisonment, for all the words I wrote before I met her were thoughts so crude; my silence has been somewhat of my own atonement, if not near as harsh as that which you took upon yourself.

I find myself wanting to write, though, for you. I shall fill these pages for you to supplement when you return, alone or not. I cannot state which I prefer to be the case, but we shall see. I trust your intentions, and the integrity of your perceptiveness; I suppose I shall also trust that iron remnant of the man I once knew.

The landscape across which we journey is new to me, if not to those amongst our number who carved this first part of our path. The way is green, heavy, lush; ahead I can see the spine of the world approaching, a serrated edge of tree-carpeted mountains, the tips crowned with white. Our progress continues. Soon we will reach the end of the track; the supplies we have loaded onto the train will allow us to continue, to extend the line. I marvel at the ingenuity that it's taken to get us here. Fran's ingenuity, even your father's ingenuity, Ffamran, for all the pain he's caused, he was the first that dreamed this idea of locomotion, a chain of progress near strong enough to still bind a society more in pieces than parts.

I cannot imagine a mind that works the way theirs do; Fran's mind, the mind of your father, even as your own mind does, Ffamran – quicksilver starts where I must plod along what seems the slowest track, linear where you leap. To see correlation in the smallest of things, to see a true path, to see the world as a web instead of the single straight line of a railroad; my mind flinches from the immensity of that thought. I have spent my life striving to see as true as you do, as swiftly, that you do not appreciate how deft your thought; far quicker than your hands. You mourn your lost six years: know that I mourn the loss of near a score of years.

For all that I feel myself inadequate to this task, to expectation, to the model Fran sets; but, ah, to read that you think me worthwhile, Ffamran – that you think me worthwhile, that Fran does, I am forever in debt to the pair of you for your belief in a broken man.

Earlier, you may remember, Ffamran, the three of us were sitting atop the last carriage well away from the smoke stack, and I watched as you wrote. You lay with your stomach to that slight camber of the roof, your chin propped on one elbow and braced against the jostle of motion, so busy with the task that you scarce looked around.

'One can always tell a writer,' I said, 'if even as he falls from his horse, he has already composed the line describing his landing before he strikes the ground.'

You looked up, the quill's feather against your lips, and grinned that mercurial grin fit to break a man's heart.

''—and as Fate does stretch her harsh hand to claim this last of my proud vanity, I consider this merely Her most recent of lessons: that it is not enough for a man to know how to ride, but that he must also know how to fall.''

‘He’s quite delightful when he thinks he's being smart,' Fran said, and you laughed—

I do wish you would laugh more.

'After suffering the dogma of my father's teaching, I did think a train a worthless thing,' you proffered, 'except in comparison to a horse. For all that horses are multi-directional creatures, they've a will of their own and I've never wanted anything thinking under me –'

'Except for me,' Fran interjected, that you looked startled and decidedly young enough to make me feel old.

I did have to wonder at your distaste for if ever there was a man born to ride you are he, so deft with control that you scarce held the reins but for show. Perhaps this is the contradiction that fuels your motion; to cleave most to those things you profess to hate, your gun, your father's word, and he.

You flushed as you responded: 'well, yes, except for – Ah, Fran, stop distracting me, I did have a point here. Yes. Before I met you I did think trains worthless, subject to the whim of the engineer that plotted the tracks, the government that commissioned the engineer, the conditions which dictated those elected to power—'

You went on. Do you see what I mean now, Ffamran? You think of the world as a web, not a line; you see everything as it affects everything else, continuous, adjacent, distant regardless. As you continued, Fran nodded her head; I could only watch, and warm.

'—but then you changed that thought; the vehicle is neither ends nor means, but both. The journey and the destination,' and you stuttered, 'both, in one.'

You didn't see then, because you glanced away, still too raw; I had to shush Fran as she opened her wicked mouth. You are imaginative enough to think of what she would have said. I know not where she developed her humour, but at times I wonder at the tarnish on my wife's silver sensibilities; you must learn to guard your tongue a little better when you return. Know this, though, that neither of us will ever let you forget that particular night for you are altogether too delightful when you blush.

'Nevertheless,' you said, when recovered, 'I find I must depart the comforts of this train to return to the dubious merits of a horse's back.'

'Leaving us already?' Fran asked.

'Oh, I'll be back. But in the rush, I seem to have left something rather important behind.'

 _And what_ , I would have said, not being near as quick a thinker as you – for your book was then in your hands, and I could think of nothing else that kept you wanting. I had long ago learned to hold my silence for a time before speaking; often Fran did deduce what was required before I could, and indeed, she responded:

'How do you know you'll find him again?'

'Oh,' you shrugged, lithe, 'he's as imaginative as an iron bar, that one, and about as predictable. I'll find him, for he'll go straight for where we stabled his horse; I'll track him from there, if he's not still sitting in the stable cooing at it. He loves that stinking thing more than life.'

'Yet another reason for you to dislike the creatures?' Fran suggested, that I had to smile, and you strove to ignore us.

'He'll gripe about not wanting my pity,' you mused, 'which is likewise not unexpected; he'll stretch that lexicon between us, and profess to want to kill me _badly_. Depending on how deft I needle him, he may even try. But the longer we move away, the more I think on this; whatever you say of his choices, Basch, he can't think beyond a day, he won't let himself, for beyond a day lies the gamut of a thousand futures without Fate's hand to dictate, and he decided himself undeserving of a future on that day at the Stand. He's stubborn enough not to realise his worth now, that people saw him with the three of us, and under me as he turned his hand to the engine's rebirth. He'll not realise that the General will be after us, if not my father also; Vossler will be all unknowing of the significance of his involvement. Considering he's supposed to be dead, the General may not be pleased to find his ex-Captain – both of them, now – still alive, and I'll not leave Vossler alone to face that.' You grimaced, setting aside notebook and gun belt both to sit, your arms loose about your knees. 'The fat bastard can't even get on his horse without me to help him mount.'

It did not even occur to me to attempt to dissuade your will. The local clan might pick off a man riding on his own even if it was along our track; but a man like you doesn't die a death like that, Ffamran. I feared for you in the company of a comrade who was once as close to me as Fran is now, for he had become a different man – reforged, and twice, in such a short space of time that I wondered at his ability to change again as swiftly as your own mercurialism required him to. Perhaps it should not surprise me that you had such faith, for had I not myself become such a different man to what I was?

If this life has taught me something, it's that revolution will never change the world, and foolishness to try; that was your father's way, Ffamran, and as the slow decay we leave behind proves, it is a way of death. The world is not what needs to be changed, but rather ourselves: in that, you are master of us all.

I said, carefully: 'He may not want—'

'He doesn't know what he wants,' you said, 'so I'll keep myself handy until he works it out.'

At that Fran did lean to kiss you, briefly yet deep, that wet sparkled between you when she drew back onto her knees.

'Something else you're good at, Archades,' Fran said. 'I'll have to start counting on the next hand now, I've run out of fingers on the one.'

'Yes?' You smiled, that Fran stirred next to me. 'What's that? My kissing?'

'Oh, goodness no, your kissing's atrocious,' she said, belying the quickening of her breath. 'I meant forgiveness.'

You grinned. 'I haven't forgiven Vossler anything.'

'Him? I didn't mean that you'd forgiven _him_ , no.'

-I marvel that the pair of you seem to say so much with so few words when with all others, you would live with layers of dialogue as distance; that you met Fran's eyes and she met yours, and I could feel what lingered between you. I wondered if the one or the both of you would break first, but you, you met her with a smile as you stood, both languid and abrupt in that fashion that I have only ever seen in you, arrogance and tension in one.

'Lucky,' you said, 'it's about time I learned to dodge the blows. They were beginning to hurt.'

You kissed Fran goodbye, at length, your fingers combing through the silver of her hair and your whole body into the effort; when you turned to me you hesitated enough that I said, blithely for all the worry your unwillingness caused: 'What, none for me?'

But you laughed, and put your fingers through my hair and gave as good as you got, to pull back and say: 'You'll have to shave, that damned monstrosity's going to shred my face if I get vigorous.'

'Three years of investment in this, whelp; grow your own if you're worried about protecting your skin.'

'That's exactly what Vossler says about his gut. Three years of investment. Half a princess's ransom counted in whiskey, more like.'

We remained aloft as you gathered food from the people below; we watched as you rode away, such fluid poetry on the back of the beast it was as if you had trained that borrowed nag yourself.

'He'll be back,' Fran said, and the uncertainty in her voice startled me.

Yes, Ffamran, you unsettled her, and I hope you're well flattered. Be sure to apologise both profusely and profoundly when you get back, with Vossler or no; notwithstanding, know that you will not be alone.

You waved, only once, and lost yourself in distance.


End file.
